Effects of experience on preference between forced and free choice.
Recent exposure can override true preference—rotate options often.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ono (2004) worked with pigeons in a lab. The birds picked between two keys.
One key led to forced choice. The other key led to free choice. The order switched each day.
What they found
Pigeons picked the side they had NOT seen lately. Past exposure beat the type of choice.
In plain words, yesterday's key mattered more than forced vs. free today.
How this fits with other research
Carr et al. (2002) saw the same flip. When food moved around, pigeons dropped old habits fast.
Storch et al. (2012) moved the idea to kids. Rotating mid-preferred toys re-energized play after satiation.
Aragona et al. (1975) looks opposite at first. They said pigeons ignored required work during blackout. The gap is timing: J watched minutes, Koichi watched days.
Why it matters
Your client may seem to "hate" a task today. It could be carry-over from yesterday's repetition, not the task itself. Swap in items or schedules you have not used lately before you drop them from the plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Preference between forced choice and free choice in concurrent-chain schedules of reinforcement was investigated in pigeons after exposure to particular combinations of terminal links. In Experiment 1, in which terminal links always ended with reinforcers, one of three pairs of terminal links was arranged as preexposure: (a) both terminal links had only one key (forced choice), (b) both terminal links had two keys (free choice), or (c) a combination of forced and free choice was arranged across sessions. In test sessions following the preexposure, pigeons' preferences rapidly shifted to the terminal links with which they had no recent experience. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was repeated except that each terminal link ended intermittently with reinforcers with a probability of .5 and there was no terminal-link arrangement with a combination of free and forced choice. Pigeons showed the same preference changes as in Experiment 1, but the preference changes did not appear immediately at the beginning of test sessions. These data suggest that recent previous experience was a more important determinant of preference than the difference between forced-choice and free-choice terminal links.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2004 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2004.81-27