Children's choice: Sensitivity to changes in reinforcer density.
Young kids follow the size of the prize, not the wait time—so front-load value before you fade in delays.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers gave 5- to young learners kids two buttons. One button gave a small candy now. The other gave a bigger candy later.
They changed two things: how big the bigger candy was, and how long the wait lasted. They watched which button each child pressed.
What they found
Every child noticed when the bigger candy grew in size. Even kindergarteners chose the large candy more often when the size difference was big.
Only older kids noticed when the wait time changed. Younger kids picked the small candy just as often even when the wait was short.
How this fits with other research
Alsop et al. (1995) ran the same candy-choice game and got the same result. Both studies show that amount beats delay for young kids.
Cullinan et al. (2001) then taught kids with ADHD to wait 24 hours for a bigger prize. They proved you can train delay tolerance, but only if you start with rich reinforcement and fade the delay slowly.
Leezenbaum et al. (2019) and Eussen et al. (2016) seem to disagree. They found that preschoolers with autism or Down syndrome could not wait at all. The gap is explained by age and diagnosis: the target study looked at older, neurotypical kids.
Why it matters
If you work with elementary kids, do not expect them to wait for thin schedules. Make reinforcers bigger, not later. Save delay-discounting lessons for middle school. When you must teach waiting, pair it with high-quality or high-rate rewards first.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two experiments were carried out in which children's sensitivity to changes in reinforcer density (number of reinforcers per session) was measured in a choice paradigm. In Experiment 1, 24 girls (ages 6, 9, and 12 years) performed on concurrent-chain schedules of reinforcement. The initial links were variable-interval 10-s schedules. One terminal link always gave three tokens after 30 s, but the parameters associated with the other were varied. Independent manipulations of reinforcer size (two tokens or four tokens) and prereinforcement delay (25 s or 65 s) led to equal changes in the relative density of tokens that could be earned on the schedules. Subjects at all ages were sensitive to changes in reinforcer density brought about by changes in reinforcer size, whereas only 3 12-year-olds showed sensitivity to the changes brought about by manipulation of prereinforcer delay. In Experiment 2, titration procedures were used to test the extent of this insensitivity to delay in 32 6- and 12-year-old children. In these procedures, a repeated choice of the large reinforcer increased the delay to its delivery, and a repeated choice of the small reinforcer reduced the delay to the delivery of the large reinforcer. Whereas 6-year-old boys and girls tended to maintain a strong preference for the large reinforcer, so increasing the delay to its delivery, 12-year-olds tended to distribute their responses to both alternatives, thus producing a stable level of delay to the large reinforcer. The results from the two experiments support the idea of two stages in the development of adaptive intertemporal choice.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1989 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1989.51-185