BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Future Thinking Processes in Intertemporal Choice and Delay DiscountingView all 3 articles
Atypical Reward Anticipation in Impulsive Individuals: Evidence from EEG and Experiential Delay Discounting
Provisionally accepted
- 1Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
- 2Center for Cognitive Sciences, Sirius University of Science and Technology, Sirius, Russia
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Background: Impulsivity is characterized by impaired inhibition of thoughts and actions and a reduced ability to weigh the consequences of behavior. Importantly, impulsivity has been associated with altered reward processing and reward anticipation. Methods: We aimed to investigate neurophysiological indices of impulsive behavior using an experiential delay discounting task with 64-channel EEG in neurotypical adults (n=54). Impulsive behavior was operationalized as the preference for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards with the delay varied from 1 to 30 seconds in different blocks. Results: We registered feedback-related fronto-central theta and centro-parietal delta power, although did not find any correlation between impulsive behavior and these neurophysiological measures of reward sensitivity.However, we found higher power spectral density in the alpha band over parieto-occipital regions during reward anticipation in individuals exhibiting more impulsive behavior in the our task. Conclusions: These results suggest that impulsive individuals have less efficient mechanisms of reward anticipation, potentially resulting in lower tolerance for waiting.
Keywords: delay discounting, EEG, experiential delay, impulsivity, time-frequency
Received: 14 Nov 2025; Accepted: 18 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zakirov and Sysoeva. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Olga V Sysoeva
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.