HOW SUBOPTIMAL IS SUBOPTIMAL CHOICE?
Salient signals can trap pigeons—and maybe people—into steady suboptimal choice even when cost and payoff are crystal clear.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hinnenkamp et al. (2017) let pigeons pick between two keys. One key gave food every time. The other gave food only sometimes, but it flashed bright lights before each win.
The birds could peck either key. The team then checked price and timing to see if those factors explained why birds kept picking the worse deal.
What they found
Even after the researchers balanced cost and erased extra cues, the pigeons still chose the key that paid less. The birds stuck with the flashy, unreliable side.
This shows a hard-wired 'suboptimal-choice effect.' Schedules alone can make animals prefer leaner, signaled rewards.
How this fits with other research
Kendall (1974) first saw pigeons favor intermittent payoff when lights marked the wins. Hinnenkamp keeps the lights but rules out price, proving the effect is real, not a math error.
Wetherington (1979) showed pigeons can track payoff odds almost perfectly. Hinnenkamp finds the opposite: birds ignore the better odds. The gap is method. L used quick, easy-to-count changes. Hinnenkamp used richer signals that hooked the birds.
Clark et al. (1970) saw choice flip toward leaner periodic schedules as work rose. Hinnenkamp agrees: requirements plus signals can override straight matching. Together, the papers warn that salient cues can lock in bad odds.
Why it matters
Your clients may also 'pick the flashy key' when reinforcers are paired with strong stimuli—think screens, noises, or social praise. Check whether the best payoff is also the most boring. If it is, fade the pizazz from the lean option or add salient cues to the richer one so the better deal competes.
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Join Free →Review your concurrent programs: strip extra lights or sounds from the lean alternative, or add equal excitement to the richer one, then watch choice shift.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In a frequently used suboptimal-choice procedure pigeons choose between an alternative that delivers three food pellets with p = 1.0 and an alternative that delivers ten pellets with p = 0.2. Because pigeons reliably choose the probabilistic (suboptimal) alternative, the procedure has been proposed as a nonhuman analog of human gambling. The present experiments were conducted to evaluate two potential threats to the validity of this procedure. Experiments 1 and 2 evaluated if pigeons obtained food at a lower unit price (i.e., pecks per pellet) on the suboptimal alternative than on the optimal alternative. When pigeons worked under this suboptimal procedure they all preferred the suboptimal alternative despite some pigeons paying a higher price for food on that alternative. In Experiment 2, when the unit price ratio more closely approximated the inverse of the expected value ratio, pigeons continued to prefer the suboptimal alternative despite its economic suboptimality. Experiment 3 evaluated if, in accord with the string-theory of gambling, the valuation of the suboptimal alternative was increased when pigeons misattributed a subset of the suboptimal no-food trials to the optimal alternative. When trial sequences were arranged to minimize these possible attribution errors, pigeons still preferred the suboptimal alternative. These data remove two threats to the validity of the suboptimal choice procedure; threats that would have suggested that suboptimal choice reflects economic maximization.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2017 · doi:10.1002/jeab.239