First of all, strict behaviorism predicts that we won’t associate anything at all with being sick the next day. Though we have a much longer memory than a dog, classical conditioning still does not work on that time scale. We may use conscious learning (by consciously recalling things and reasoning things through, just as you say –which I assume is your real point) but that is not the same as being conditioned in a behaviorist sense. The difference is important and it is probably partly because of this difference that, like you mention, rewarding soon is better than rewarding later and thus resorting to conscious learning (as humans, we probably like to think that we don’t respond to classical conditioning, but we do).

The other issue here is that when we get up feeling sick the next day we might very likely associate being sick with whatever we had to eat the night before but there’s a good chance that this association may have nothing to do with logically looking at it and realizing that being sick from food makes more sense than being sick from opera (again, one could question even this point but I digress). Food aversion seems to be a special case which does not follow the timing requirements from behaviorist theory and yet there’s nothing conscious about it. Rats can do it and it is doubtful that they are reasoning about how food can sometimes make you sick and about whether there was anything different in the rat chow the night before. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste_aversion .

As for the teaser, a good teaser it is!!! Can’t wait to read your opinions on that… Will make for good discussion I’m sure. I’ve trained in the past under Pierre Roy here in Montréal (look him up; he’s a “subtle and humble” legend in the sport) and, we’ve discussed this very idea many times (at least with regards to Canadian Olympic Lifting which, generally speaking, sucks just as bad as US OL!!!!).

Lots to look forward to then…