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Rock Doves Preferred Predictive Information Despite a Lower Food Payoff

Rock dove standing in shallow water at Retiro Park, Madrid
Research · Behaviour

Rock doves (Columba livia) strongly preferred an option that gave perfectly predictive information about the coming outcome even though it produced food on only 20% of trials. The alternative delivered food on 50% of trials, but its cues did not tell the birds whether food was coming. In the narrow currency of food gained, this is a classic example of suboptimal choice: the animals favour the lower-payoff alternative.

Predictive information outweighed the higher food payoff

Eight pigeons entered the controlled experiment and seven remained in the main analyses after one bird was removed for a persistent side bias. During simultaneous choice training, preference for the informative option rose to an average of 98% over the final four sessions. The information could not be used to change whether food would arrive; its value lay in reliably signalling either food or no food.

The researchers then turned the same problem into a sequential accept–reject decision. Instead of seeing both options at once, a pigeon encountered one option and could either accept it or reject it to obtain the alternative. When rejection carried no extra time cost, the learned preference reappeared: over the final four sessions the informative option was rejected on only 6% of trials, whereas the higher-payoff non-informative option was rejected on 78%. A later return to the cost-free condition reproduced the same strong asymmetry.

A delay made the higher-payoff option harder to reject

When rejecting an option imposed a delay before the alternative became available, pigeons became progressively less likely to reject the non-informative option and more willing to accept the 50%-payoff option already in front of them. Rejection of the informative option remained rare and changed little with the delay. The birds therefore retained a strong valuation of predictive information while adjusting whether to continue searching when switching became costly.

The result links cognition to opportunity cost

This pattern fits the concept of opportunity cost: time spent rejecting one opportunity and waiting for another is time in which no food can be obtained. Rate-based foraging models therefore treat an option partly in terms of expected reward relative to the time needed to obtain it. In this experiment, the group-level point at which accepting and continuing to search became roughly balanced was estimated at about five seconds of post-rejection delay. The authors used the rate model as a heuristic framework rather than as a formal model test.

The study therefore extends suboptimal choice beyond the usual side-by-side task. The preference for predictive information survived when pigeons had to decide whether to accept what was currently available or continue searching, but their rejection behaviour remained sensitive to the temporal cost of moving on.

Sources and image credit

  1. Vasconcelos, M., Kirkman, C., Blaisdell, A. P., & Machado, A. (2026). From choice to search: suboptimal preferences in sequential accept-reject decisions. Animal Cognition.Primary peer-reviewed open-access article published 10 September 2026; full article-in-press PDF checked. Eight Columba livia entered the experiment and seven remained in the main analyses. The informative option paid on 20% of trials and the non-informative option on 50%. Informative choice reached 98% late in training. Under cost-free rejection, informative and non-informative options were rejected on 6% and 78% of trials, and 8% and 86% on re-test. Increasing post-rejection delays selectively reduced rejection of the non-informative option; the estimated group indifference point was 4.86 s (95% CI 2.26–7.47), while the rate-based model's raw prediction was 3 s.

Image: Rock dove (Columba livia) at Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain, 22 April 2015. Photo: Carlos Delgado / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons Quality Image; representative species image, not a bird from the laboratory experiment. · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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