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Functional equivalence in children: derived stimulus-response and stimulus-stimulus relations
P M Smeets1, D Barnes, B Roche
1Department of Psychology, Leiden University, Holland. smeets@rulfsw.leidenuniv.nl
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|July 1, 1997
Summary
This study explored how children learn stimulus-response and stimulus-stimulus relations. Findings suggest functional equivalence can occur without requiring stimulus equivalence, impacting learning in young children.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Learning Sciences
Background:
- Understanding emergent relations is key to explaining complex learning in children.
- Distinguishing between functional equivalence and stimulus equivalence provides insight into learning mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the simultaneous emergence of functional equivalence and stimulus equivalence in young children.
- To examine the relationship between trained stimulus-response and stimulus-stimulus relations.
Main Methods:
- Pretraining and testing on symbolic match-to-sample tasks.
- Training specific responses to stimulus pairs and reassignment training for novel responses.
- Assessing emergent stimulus-stimulus, response-stimulus, and response-response relations.
Main Results:
- 15 out of 18 children demonstrated novel responses in the presence of nonreassigned stimuli, indicating functional equivalence.
- 11 children also matched same-class stimuli, showing stimulus equivalence.
- Children failing to show stimulus control transfer also failed to match same-class stimuli.
Conclusions:
- Functional equivalence can occur independently of stimulus equivalence in children's learning.
- These findings, consistent with animal research, highlight the nuanced nature of emergent relational learning.