Assessing stimulus equivalence with a precursor to the relational evaluation procedure

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Learning and Memory

Background:

• Human adults typically demonstrate emergent relational responding, such as symmetry and equivalence, after training on match-to-sample (MTS) tasks.
• The precursor to the Relational Evaluation Procedure (pREP) assesses these relations using conditional go/no-go discrimination tasks.
• Previous research suggested pREP effectively measures symmetry and equivalence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To replicate previous findings on emergent symmetry and equivalence using MTS and pREP.
• To investigate the conditions under which individuals demonstrate these relational performances on pREP tasks.
• To analyze response patterns associated with successful and unsuccessful pREP performance.

Main Methods:

• Five experiments were conducted involving human adults trained on MTS tasks (A-B, B-C).
• Participants were assessed on symmetry (B-A, C-B) and equivalence (C-A) using both MTS tests and pREP tasks.
• pREP involved conditional go/no-go discriminations based on stimulus class membership.

Main Results:

• Very few participants demonstrated pREP symmetry and equivalence without prior MTS testing or specific pREP pretraining.
• Symmetry failures were characterized by responding around 50% of the time.
• Equivalence failures typically involved consistent responding or non-responding across trials.

Conclusions:

• The findings challenge the generalizability of pREP as a standalone measure for emergent relations without prior MTS experience.
• Specific pretraining or prior demonstration of relations via MTS may be crucial for successful pREP performance.
• Response patterns provide insights into the underlying processes of relational learning and assessment.