What is it about?
Animals and humans sometimes make different choices depending on whether options are mutually exclusive (e.g., choose this or that) or not (e.g., choose this, and then you can have that). This experiment investigates how these different task structures impact self control in pigeons, in order to identify the behavioural mechanisms contributing to self-controlled choice.
Featured Image
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our findings show that levels of self-control differ with different choice structures, highlighting the complex nature of self-controlled choice. Additionally, we show that inherent biases and environmental feedback jointly influence self-control. We suggest that these factors may sometimes work together to increase self-control in sequential-choice tasks, but at other times they may actually decrease self-control.
Perspectives
This was an idea I had during my first year of postgraduate studies, and it was so rewarding to see it come to fruition years later as an academic researcher. I'm now conducting further research to identify the procedural features that increase or decrease self-control, with the hope to extend this knowledge to advance our understanding of self-controlled behaviour in humans.
Stephanie Gomes-Ng
Auckland University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pigeons’ (Columba livia) intertemporal choice in binary-choice and patch-leaving contexts., Journal of Comparative Psychology, August 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/com0000387.
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