Interaction of Contingencies and Rule Instructions in the Performance of Human Subjects in Conditional Discrimination

Interindividual Performance in Metacontingencies

“…With regard to the e ect of ambiguous rules on interlocked behaviors, the ndings of this study showed that the level of ambiguity of rules presented to individuals at the beginning of each trial a ected the levels of accuracy and duration of their interlocked behavioral responding. ese data support ndings reported by Ribes-Iñesta and Martínez-Sánchez (1990), and later by Smith et al (2012), in which exposure to inaccurate rules resulted in highly variable verbal interactions (secondary verbal adjustment) as well as variable levels of performance. Moreover, the ndings of this study suggest that when dyads work together and simultaneously communicate, their performance is increasingly e cient and certain types of verbal interactions (secondary verbal adjustments) seemed to recur under various ambiguous circumstances.…”

Instructional Effects on Performance in a Matching‐to‐sample Study

“…A few studies (Dymond & Barnes, 1998;Green, Sigurdardottir, & Saun-ders, 1991;Sigurdardottir, Green, & Saunders, 1990) reported that participants respond appropriately to conditional discriminations throughout an MTS task just as well when not instructed. Ribes-Inesta and Martinez-Sanchez (1990) and Martinez and Tamayo (2005) demonstrated that providing inaccurate instructions can disrupt performance on MTS tasks. A number of studies have shown that instructions can make participants relatively insensitive to changes in the contingencies within a study (Galizio, 1979;Hayes, Brownstein, Haas, & Greenway, 1986;Shimoff, Catania, & Matthews, 1981;Shimoff, Matthews, & Catania 1986), but none of these involved MTS preparations.…”

Contingent-relations description facilitates rule-following in a subsequent generalization task

“…Appropriate tests for rule governance (or rule construction) are more difficult to construct for the behavior analyst, due in part to a greater emphasis on implied or "self-generated" behaviors associated with rule governance. Thus tests for rule governance often require new contexts or stimuli, new sets of behaviors, or new responses in order to test the "emergence" of a novel behavior controlled by a set of "rule stimuli" (Pelaez-Nogueras & Gewirtz, 1995;Ribes-Inesta & Martinez-Sanchez, 1990). …”

“…Others have looked at the role of verbal behavior in facilitating correct responses in matching-to-sample conditionaldiscrimination tasks (e.g., Ribes-Inesta & Martinez-Sanchez, 1990;Trigo, MartinezSanchez & Moreno, 1995). However, the extent to which the subjects' opportunity to describe of contingent relations facilitates subsequent rule-following in generalization/transfer tasks requires further investigation.…”