Despite the widespread use of the delay discounting task in clinical and non-clinical contexts, several task versions are available in the literature, making it hard to compare results across studies. Moreover, normative data are not available to evaluate individual performances. The present study aims to propose a unified version of the delay discounting task based on monetary rewards and it provides normative values built on an Italian sample of 357 healthy participants. The most used parameters in the literature to assess the delay discount rate were compared to find the most valid index to discriminate between normative data and a clinical population who typically present impulsivity issues, i.e., patients with a lesion to the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). In line with our hypothesis, mOFC patients showed higher delay discounting scores than the normative sample and the normative group. Based on this evidence, we propose that the task and indexes here provided can be used to identify extremely high (above the 90th percentile for hyperbolic k or below the 10th percentile for AUC) or low (below the 10th percentile for hyperbolic k or above the 90th percentile for AUC) delay discounting performances. The complete dataset, the R code used to perform all analyses, a free and modifiable version of the delay discounting task, as well as the R code that can be used to extract all indexes from such tasks and compare subjective performances with the normative data here presented are available as online materials.

Motivational (i.e., appetitive or aversive) cues can bias value-based decisions by affecting either direction and intensity of instrumental actions. Despite several findings describing important interindividual differences in these biases, whether biological sex can also play a role is still up to debate. By comparing females and males in both appetitive and aversive Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer paradigms we found that, while motivational cues similarly bias the direction of instrumental actions in both sexes, the intensity of such actions is increased by the cue in male participants only. The present results constitute compelling evidence that a crucial motivational bias of daily actions directed to obtaining rewards or avoiding punishments is modulated by biological sex. This evidence sheds new light on the role of sex in motivational processes that underlie decision-making, highlighting the importance of considering sex as a crucial factor in future research on this topic.

A recent study by Hakus et al. (2025) demonstrated sex‐associated differences in Pavlovian phenotypes in rodents, with females more likely to exhibit sign‐tracking behaviour and males more likely to exhibit goal‐tracking behaviour. In the present work, we provide evidence that similar patterns emerge in humans. Using a validated eye‐tracking procedure in a Pavlovian learning paradigm, we show that women are more frequently classified as sign‐trackers and quantitatively show greater sign‐tracking behaviour than men in a large human sample. These results support the translational value of preclinical findings and highlight the importance of considering sex differences in incentive salience attribution. Given the established link between sign‐trackers and addiction vulnerability, our findings may help refine our understanding of individual risk factors in the development of such disorders.

Successful reward-guided behavior relies not only on learning actions to obtain rewards but also on learning cues that predict the reward, which motivate and prepare the animal to pursue and consume it. Although these two types of learning—instrumental learning and pavlovian conditioning—have been extensively studied, it remains unclear how the brain updates and arbitrates between these systems, especially when pavlovian signals are irrelevant to decision-making. To address this, we used eye-tracking, pupillometry, and computational modeling in a pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer task with 60 humans (30 females), consisting of three phases: pavlovian phase (learning stimulus–outcome associations), instrumental phase (learning response–outcome associations), and transfer phase (testing pavlovian bias on instrumental responses). Using this approach, we aimed to identify different types of learners and their strategies, especially how individual differences in sign-trackers versus goal-trackers influence pavlovian bias. To that end, we used eye gaze data to categorize participants as sign- or goal-trackers and found that although both groups learned the task, sign-trackers’ performance was lower when exposed to pavlovian cues, as they favored options based on their cue–outcome associations. Fitting data with multiple computational models revealed that participants dynamically arbitrated between values estimated through pavlovian and instrumental systems. Importantly, lower performance in sign-trackers was due to slower updating of pavlovian cue values during the transfer phase, not overweighting of pavlovian cue values relative to instrumental action values. Overall, our study offers a computational framework for understanding inflexible decision-making and potential interventions for disorders marked by maladaptive cue reactivity.

Reward-predictive cues can affect decision-making by enhancing instrumental responses toward the same (specific transfer) or similar (general transfer) rewards. The main theories on cue-guided decision-making consider specific transfer as driven by the activation of previously learned instrumental actions induced by cues sharing the sensory-specific properties of the reward they are associated with. However, to date, such theoretical assumption has never been directly investigated at the neural level. We hypothesize that such reactivation occurs within the premotor system and could be mapped by lateralized beta (12–30 Hz) desynchronization, a widely used marker of action selection and decision-making policy. To test this hypothesis, 42 participants (22 females) performed a pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer paradigm, while electroencephalographic activity was recorded. We anticipated increased beta desynchronization during the transfer phase when cues promoting specific transfer were presented, compared with cues predicting general transfer and neutral cues. The evidence collected confirmed our hypothesis, thus providing the first neural evidence in favor of the theorized reactivation of instrumental actions and corroborating the presence of two dissociable neural pathways underpinning specific and general transfer.