Response Latencies to Multiple Derived Stimulus Relations: Testing Two Predictions of Relational Frame Theory

Abstract

In Experiment 1, 3 college students were exposed to relational pretraining to establish the contextual functions of Same, Opposite, More Than, and Less Than in four arbitrary stimuli. Subjects were then trained on the matching-to-sample tasks A 1-81 and Y1-N1, in the presence of the More-Than contextual cue, A 1-82 and Y1-N2 in the presence of the Less-Than contextual cue, C1-D1 and E1 -D2 in the presence of the Same cue, and C1-D2 and E1-D1 in the presence of the Opposite cue. Test trials were subsequently administered to probe for the mutually entailed relations; Less-Than/81-A 1, Less-ThanlN1-Y1, More-Than/82-A1 , More-Than/N2-Y1 , Same/D1-C1, Same/D2-E1, Opposite/D2-C1, and Opposite/D1-E1. Response latencies to probes for derived Same/Opposite relations were significantly lower than those for derived More ThaniLess Than relations. Experiment 2 exposed 4 subjects to training across each of the four relations and used a novel stimulus set to test for reduced response latencies to the derived relations. Response latencies to More-ThaniLess-Than probes reduced significantly across the original to the novel stimulus set, whereas latencies to Same/Opposite probes were low across both stimulus sets.When human subjects are trained on a series of conditional discriminations, the stimuli involved may control responding in ways that are not readily predicted using traditional behavioral principles. For example, if choosing the arbitrary stimuli, B1 and C1, is reinforced on separate trials, given a further stimulus, A 1, then, the presentation of B1 or C1 may reliably occasion the choosing of A1 (symmetry) without reinforcement. Furthermore, the presentation of B1 may control choosing C1, and the presentation of C1 may control choosing B1 (combined symmetry and transitivity), again without reinforcement. These effects are collectively referred to as stimulus equivalence and the stimuli A 1, B 1, and C1 are said to participate in an equivalence relation (Barnes, 1994;Barnes & Holmes, 1991;Hayes, 1991;Sidman, 1971Sidman, , 1990).Requests for reprints should be addressed to Bryan Roche, Department of Psychology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth , Co. Kildare, Ireland. The authors thank Michael Clayton and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. The first three authors say farewell to Cork, where so many ideas were born .

Three Chronometric Indices of Relational Responding as Predictors of Performance on a Brief Intelligence Test: The Importance of Relational Flexibility

“…This result is consistent with the argument that the equivalence relation is the most fundamental class of relational responding, and it is likely established very early in a child's verbal repertoire (Hayes, 1991). Furthermore, the current data are consistent with the results of a previous study, which showed that response latencies were shorter on tasks that probed for derived sameness/difference relations relative to temporal relations (O'Hora, Roche, & Barnes-Holmes, 2002). Also interesting to note is that the difference-score was greater for similar/different relative to the before/after relation, which indicates that reversing the former relation was more difficult than reversing the latter relation.…”

The Effect of Training Structure on the Latency of Responses to a Five-Term Linear Chain

“…For example, if a verbally able human participant is trained, in a matching-to-sample context, to match A to Band B to C, he or she will also likely match B to A (mutual entailment), and A to C and C to A (combinatorial entailment) without reinforcement (see Fields, Adams, Verhave, & Newman, 1990;Sidman, 1992). Furthermore, some researchers (e.g., Hayes & argue that humans can learn to respond in accordance with a variety of derived stimulus relations, including; Same, Opposite, and Different (Dymond & Barnes, 1996;Roche & Barnes, 1996Roche, Barnes-Holmes, Smeets, Barnes-Holmes, & McGeady, 2000;Steele & Hayes, 1991), More-than and Less-than (Dymond & Barnes, 1995;O'Hora, Roche, Barnes-Holmes, & Smeets, 2002; see also BarnesHolmes, Roche, Healy, Lyddy, Cullinan, & Hayes, 2001), and Before and After (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, Dymond, & O'Hora, 2001). …”

A Transformation of Functions in Accordance with the Nonarbitrary Relational Properties of Sexual Stimuli

“…For instance, a participant might consistently select the sixstar comparison in the presence of the three-star sample and therefore fail to learn that the "more-than" four-star comparison is also correct (i.e., the More-than cue would control selection of the opposite comparison, rather than a comparison that was simply more than the sample). The use of only two comparisons thereby ensured that Opposite relational control could not occur during More-than and Less-than pretraining and in the critical probes phase (Dymond & Barnes, 1995;O'Hora et al, 2002).…”

“…To date, a wide variety of stimulus function transformations has been demonstrated in accordance with equivalence relations (e.g., Barnes & Keenan, 1993;Dougher, Augustson, Markham, Greenway, & Wulfert, 1994;Dougher, Perkins, Greenway, Koons, & Chiasson, 2002;Dymond & Barnes, 1995;Rehfeldt & Hayes, 1998;Smeets & Barnes-Holmes, 2003; see Dymond & Rehfeldt, 2000, for a review) and derived relations other than equivalence, such as Sameness, Opposition, and Difference (Dymond & Barnes, 1996;Steele & Hayes, 1991;Roche & Barnes, 1996Whelan & Barnes-Holmes, 2004), More than and Less than (Dymond & Barnes, 1995;O'Hora, Roche, Barnes-Holmes, & Smeets, 2002;Whelan, Barnes-Holmes, & Dymond, 2006), and Before and After (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, Dymond, & O'Hora, 2001; O'Hora, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2004). For example, Roche and Barnes (1997) exposed participants to a relational pretraining procedure to establish contextual functions of Same and Opposite for two arbitrary stimuli.…”