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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 3, 2026

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments

A Psychophysics Paradigm for the Collection and Analysis of Similarity Judgments

Published on: March 1, 2022

Acquired equivalence between stimuli trained in the same context.

Mikael Molet¹, Holly C Miller, Thomas R Zentall

¹Université de Lille, Nord de France, Lille, France. mikael.molet@univ-lille3.fr

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|April 6, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Context plays a crucial role in human acquired equivalence. Stimuli trained in the same context become equivalent, even when presented in a neutral setting.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Behavioral Science

Background:

Acquired equivalence is a form of stimulus equivalence.
Context can influence learning and generalization.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of context in human acquired equivalence.
To determine if shared context during training leads to stimulus equivalence.

Main Methods:

Participants completed two conditional discrimination tasks.
Different conditional relations were trained in distinct contexts.
Test trials involved interchanging stimuli and presenting them in a neutral context.

Main Results:

Positive transfer was observed on test trials.
Stimuli trained in the same context were treated as equivalent.
Contextual cues influenced the generalization of learned relations.

Conclusions:

Context is a critical factor in establishing acquired equivalence.
The findings support the role of contextual control in stimulus generalization.
Understanding contextual influences is key to explaining complex learned associations.