Delay discounting data in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study: Modeling and analysis considerations

Abstract

This report provides a primer to delay discounting data in the context of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Delay discounting describes the tendency for organisms to devalue temporally constrained outcomes. This decision-making framework has garnered attention from multiple fields for its association with various behavioral health conditions like substance use disorder. Importantly, the literature on delay discounting describes many approaches to analyzing and interpreting discounting data. To be most beneficial to the broader scientific audience, consistency and reproducibility in how delay discounting data are operationalized, analyzed, and interpreted is key. We describe relevant data analysis methods for use with the ABCD Study, a large-cohort longitudinal study (N = 11,878) examining delay discounting among youth respondents across child and adolescent development. Particular attention is given to data collected from children and younger populations given their relevance to ABCD research and potential merit for unique analytic considerations (e.g., higher rates of atypical responding). We first provide a background on the broad theoretical and conceptual aspects of discounting research. We then review discounting assessment, describing conventional titration tasks and the more novel algorithm-based approaches to generating descriptive metrics. We conclude with recommendations for best practice modeling, data handling and exclusions based on nonsystematic data, and ensuing interpretations. Analytic pipelines and coding are provided for investigator use. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)