Relations between Verbal Self-Stimulation, Stimulus Modality, and Accuracy in an Operant Task

From an operant perspective, verbal behavior is multiply controlled by different sources of stimulation, including self-stimulation. Self-stimulation (i.e., responding with respect to one's own response products) is thought to be especially important for verbal mediation that temporally extends discriminative stimulus control. While previous research has examined the effects of self-stimulation across multiple dimensions of verbal responding, stimulus control of patterns of self-stimulation in conjunction with other patterns of discriminative stimuli of different modalities have arguably received less attention. The purpose of this study was to examine relations between patterns of self-stimulation and different types of verbal discriminative stimulation (i.e., visual and auditory) through differences in their contribution to verbal response accuracy in a recall task. Using a novel online task, participants completed a series of trials in which they (1) typed a 7-digit sequence of digits presented to them either visually or auditorily in which response products were (a) unmasked (typing different keys produced different characters) or (b) masked (typing different keys produced the same character) in the initial response phase, (2) engaged in an intervening activity in the distractor phase, and (3) retyped the same sequence of digits during the recall phase that was initially presented during the initial response phase. While no significant differences in accuracy of digits submitted during recall phases were observed with respect to visual and auditory verbal discriminative stimuli, the average total number of correct digits typed during recall phases was found to be higher when response products were unmasked in the initial response phase than when they were masked.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-024-00201-x.