Pre-crastination in the pigeon

Abstract

Procrastination is the tendency to delay initiating or completing tasks. Rosenbaum et al. (Psychological Science, May 8, 2014) recently documented the opposite of procrastination: pre-crastination, the tendency to begin or to finish tasks as soon as possible. We devised a simple two-alternative forced-choice task, in which pigeons could choose to switch response location either sooner or later in a sequence of actions eventuating in food reward. Even though there was no economic advantage for doing so, pigeons chose to switch response location sooner rather than later in the sequence, showing pre-crastination to be quite general. Pre-crastination thus joins other anticipatory learning phenomena in challenging rational or optimal accounts of behavioral adaptation.