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This capacity can be measured in childhood as a means of anticipating objective outcomes much later in life, with greater self-control exhibited at a young age related to better outcomes later in life

Michael J. Beran

2016

Scholarcy highlights

  • This capacity can be measured in childhood as a means of anticipating objective outcomes much later in life, with greater self-control exhibited at a young age related to better outcomes later in life
  • Our manipulations of the series of food items on each trial through the sequence of experiments allowed us to assess the role of individual item value, how long until the best item was presented, the role of item visibility, and the role of delay until exchange could occur on this form of self-control behavior with anticipation of future reward delivery
  • There is some evidence that qualitative increases in reward value generate better-sustained delay of gratification than quantitative increases. To assess whether this was true in the present exchange paradigm, we introduced two of the highest preference items on each trial but varied their size to see if the chimpanzees still would exchange until receiving the larger piece
  • This indicated the capacity for tolerating exchanges of the highest value food type when it was not the largest food item of that type, and showed that the chimpanzees were exchanging low preference items on the basis of a rule that went beyond just “trade until a high value food type is given.”
  • As demonstrated nicely with several species in previous research, exchanging food items as a means to obtain a better, later reward is an intuitive task in which the animals control the pacing of the exchange and the termination of the trial by consuming the desired reward

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