Risky Choice in Pigeons and Humans: A Cross-Species Comparison

Pigeon and human subjects were given repeated choices between variable and adjusting delays to token reinforcement that titrated in relation to a subject's recent choice patterns. Indifference curves were generated under two different procedures: "immediate exchange," in which a token earned during each trial was exchanged immediately for access to the terminal reinforcer (food for pigeons, video clips for humans), and "delayed exchange," in which tokens accumulated and were exchanged after 11 trials. The former was designed as an analogue of procedures typically used with nonhuman subjects, the latter as an analogue to procedures typically used with human participants. Under both procedure types, different variable-delay schedules were manipulated systematically across conditions in ways that altered the reinforcer immediacy of the risky option. Under immediate-exchange conditions, both humans and pigeons consistently preferred the variable delay, and indifference points were generally ordered in relation to relative reinforcer immediacies. Such risk sensitivity was greatly reduced under delayed-exchange conditions. Choice and trial-initiation response latencies varied directly with indifference points, suggesting that local analyses may provide useful ancillary measures of reinforcer value. On the whole, the results indicate that modifying procedural features brings choices of pigeons and humans into better accord, and that human-nonhuman differences on risky choice procedures reported in the literature may be at least partly a product of procedural differences. (Contains 13 figures and 2 tables.)