From choice to search: suboptimal preferences in sequential accept-reject decisions

Abstract Animals often make decisions that deviate from optimality, favoring alternatives that yield less overall reward. A striking case is the suboptimal choice paradigm, in which pigeons consistently prefer an informative option with a lower payoff over a non-informative alternative that yields more food. Although this phenomenon has been widely studied in simultaneous choice tasks, less is known about whether it extends to sequential decision contexts. The present study tested pigeons in a sequential accept/reject version of the suboptimal choice task, in which they could accept an option or reject it in favor of the alternative, with rejection incurring either no cost or a fixed temporal delay adjusted across sessions based on each pigeon’s rejection rate. In cost-free rejection conditions, pigeons overwhelmingly accepted the informative option while rejecting the non-informative one. A derived rejection-based preference score closely tracked the usual choice-based preference score, though it was typically less extreme. When rejection incurred a temporal cost, however, pigeons accepted the non-informative option increasingly as the delay grew longer. By contrast, rejection of the informative option was rare and largely insensitive to cost. These results demonstrate that suboptimal choice occurs in both sequential and simultaneous choice contexts and that rejection decisions are shaped by opportunity costs in ways consistent with rate-based foraging models.