Learning in animals is studied mostly by behaviorists of one sort or another. Behaviorists differ among themselves, of course. Radical (Skinnerian) behaviorists look at things a little differently from associative learning (Hullian) behaviorists. And there are cognitive types who favor computer-like metaphors and presumptions about symbolic processing. Nevertheless, all agree in their disdain for the folk psychology of wishes, feelings, and conscious deliberation. No behaviorist would take as a model for choice Charles Darwin's agonizing about whether or not to marry. Darwin wrote copious notes, two months before his engagement to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, listing the pros and cons. A sample:

This is choice indeed! No one would imagine that animals choose like this. But folk psychology often slips in unannounced. In his famous matching-law experiment, to make his procedure work, Richard Herrnstein added what is called a changeover delay (COD): neither response could be rewarded for a second or two after each change from one response to the other. The reason was to prevent a third response: switching. Matching is got only when switching is suppressed by the COD: “The precise correspondence between relative frequency of responding and relative frequency of reinforcement broke down when the COD was omitted.”

But a little thought reveals that the response of “switching” is entirely hypothetical. It was derived neither from direct observation nor from proven theory. It came from intuition. If you, like the pigeon, had to choose repeatedly between two options, you might well consider “switching” as a third option to be assessed for payoff along with the other two.