Valence generalization across nonrecurring structures

Semantically meaningless letter strings correlated with affective attributes (US) can become evaluatively conditioned stimuli (CS). Jurchiș et al. (2020) recently demonstrated CS-US correlations may influence evaluations toward previously unseen strings when the latter are grammatically congruent with CS. We replicated those authors' findings in a modified extension (Experiment 1; N = 108), where emotional faces (US) were correlated with letter strings (CS) constructed from familiar (English) and unfamiliar (Phoenician) alphabets. CS-US trials were sandwiched by evaluations of strings that never appeared as CS but were constructed using similar grammar rules. Although CS and evaluated strings never overlapped, their individual elements (letters) recurred between phases. Element recurrence was controlled for in a second replication (Experiment 2; N = 140), where participants viewed Phoenician (/English) strings during conditioning and English (/Phoenician) strings during evaluations. We found credible evidence for valence generalization across strings from different alphabets but parallel grammars, suggesting the latter had been perceived as 'functionally equivalent' (Tonneau, 2004b). We provide support for this claim in a third study (Experiment 3; N = 79), where participants underwent a 'free selection' 2AFC discrimination task with sample and comparison strings taken from different alphabets. Increasing frequencies of grammar-congruent discriminations suggested strings were becoming functionally equated along overlapping grammar rules. We speculate how 'rules' which inform how elements are organized relative to each another can be abstracted and generalized across without specifying elemental properties (Spaulding, 1912). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).