Performance in temporal discounting tasks by people with intellectual disabilities reveals difficulties in decision-making and impulse control.
A five-minute coaching boost helps most adults with ID wait for bigger rewards—check their executive function first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Romanowich et al. (2010) asked the adults with intellectual disability to play a waiting game.
They could pick $5 today or wait for $10 next week.
Only the adults could stick with the rules after one try.
The team then gave a short 5-minute coaching session.
They tested again to see who could wait better.
What they found
After coaching, 12 more adults could wait for the bigger reward.
The ones who still struggled had poor executive function scores.
IQ scores did not predict who would improve.
Working memory and planning skills did.
How this fits with other research
Poppes et al. (2010) ran a similar study with money choices.
Both papers show adults with ID lean on single facts, not big pictures.
Both link the trouble to weak executive skills, not low IQ.
Su et al. (2008) found verbal memory predicts daily living skills.
Paul adds that executive skills predict learning new money tasks.
Together they say: train the brain skill that matches the goal.
Why it matters
When you assess money skills, add a quick executive function probe.
A five-minute prompt like “stop and think first” can triple success.
Pick clients with stronger working memory for complex money goals.
Others may need simpler choices or more coaching steps.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The subjective value of rewards declines as a function of the delay to receive them (temporal discounting). Three temporal discounting tasks that assessed preferences between small amounts of money (10 pence) over short delays (60 s), moderate amounts of money (10 pound) over moderate delays (2 weeks), and large amounts of money (1000 pound) over long delays (12 months) were presented to people with intellectual disabilities (Full-Scale IQ < 70) and to a comparison group (ns = 20 for each group). Measures of IQ, financial knowledge, memory, and executive functioning were also obtained. Only a third of the service users were able to perform the temporal discounting tasks consistently, and they tended to respond impulsively. The proportion of participants responding consistently increased following training. Both the initial performance and the effect of training were related to executive functioning but not IQ.
American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2010 · doi:10.1352/1944-7558-115.2.157