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.
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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.
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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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