Data from: Evolutionary pressures on primate intertemporal choice

From finding food to choosing mates, animals must make intertemporal
choices that involve fitness benefits available at different times.
Species vary dramatically in their willingness to wait for delayed
rewards. Why does this variation across species exist? An adaptive
approach to intertemporal choice suggests that time preferences should
reflect the temporal problems faced in a species's environment. Here,
I use phylogenetic regression to test whether allometric factors relating
to body size, relative brain size and social group size predict how long
13 primate species will wait in laboratory intertemporal choice tasks.
Controlling for phylogeny, a composite allometric factor that includes
body mass, absolute brain size, lifespan and home range size predicted
waiting times, but relative brain size and social group size did not.
These findings support the notion that selective pressures have sculpted
intertemporal choices to solve adaptive problems faced by animals.
Collecting these types of data across a large number of species can
provide key insights into the evolution of decision making and cognition.