Allison Barrera-Flores, C’27, Presents Study on Human Decision-Making

Dec. 8, 2025

People are not always rational beings. Instead, we have the tendency to switch our preference from one prospect to another simply because of the passage of time. Teaming up for a study of human decision-making, Allison Barrera-Flores, C’27, and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology Thomas Reppert aimed to quantify the human tendency to devalue goods that are received in the future.

Barrera-Flores was instrumental in designing a delay discounting task—a research tool that is used to evaluate how individuals value rewards over time, for instance by comparing the receipt of $10 today vs. $15 in a week—and collecting and analyzing behavioral data including participant choices and time to respond. In particular, she completed a new analysis of differences in response time across participants in the study, showing that some participants generally responded much more quickly than others. Barrera-Flores' work also showed that differences in reaction time might be related to the rate of delay discounting across participants.

Barrera-Flores was the first author on a research poster titled "Inter-individual differences in delay discounting behavior," which she presented at the Middle Tennessee Psychological Association meeting earlier this year.

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