Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the effect of manipulating verb tense (e.g, getting $5 vs. will get $5) within a single language on in-tertemporal tradeoffs presented as written stimuli. Verb tense can significantly affect choices between options, with peoplepreferring present-tense options, due to inferences about timing. However, this occurs only in the complete absence ofother timing cues and is eliminated by introducing even vague or non-diagnostic time cues. Gricean maxims of conver-sational implicature say that people maximize relevance and minimize quantity in conversations. Our results suggest thatthat decision makers search across cues for the most relevant information. Tense is deemed to be such a cue in the absenceof other temporal information.