Thinking of learning phenomena as instances of relational behavior

Comparing partial repetition costs in two- and four-choice tasks: Evidence for abstract relational codes.

“…That is, heuristics like "change the response if the location changes" may be bound in event-files, leading to (a) the asymmetry between complete repetition benefits and complete change benefits when the number of SR alternatives increases and (b) the sequential modulation of the signaling effect. The idea that propositional information (i.e., heuristics) is bound to stimulus features also mirrors recent proposals in the conditioning literature that propositions play a role in associative learning behaviors (see De Houwer et al, 2021Houwer et al, , 2022. In short, binding based on relational features can explain the present findings.…”

Putting relating at the core of language-of-thought

“…By adhering to behavioral definitions of those phenomena (e.g., conditioning as the impact of stimulus pairings on behavior), we could at least raise the possibility that these phenomena are mediated by propositional representations (see De Houwer, 2019; De Houwer, Van Dessel, & Moran, 2021). Moreover, it allowed us to link those phenomena with the literature on AARR (e.g., De Houwer, Finn, Raemaekers, Cummins, & Boddez, in press; Hughes, De Houwer, & Perugini, 2016b).…”

“…Because of its emphasis on relational responding, a behavioral RFT perspective on thinking and reasoning is highly compatible with the cognitive idea that thinking and reasoning rely on propositional (i.e., relational) representations (also see McLoughlin, Tyndall, & Pereira, 2020). The added value of adopting this behavioral perspective on thinking and reasoning is that it (a) offers a new way of talking about thinking and reasoning that is abstract, precise, and separated from folk psychology terms, (b) sheds new light on the difference in thinking and reasoning in verbal and nonverbal organisms (De Houwer et al, 2016), (c) allows researchers to relate knowledge about the moderators of AARR to knowledge about thinking and reasoning, which (d) includes ideas about how thinking and reasoning is shaped during the learning history of organisms (and therefore how developmental deficits in thinking and reasoning can be remedied; De Houwer et al, in press). I therefore hope that cognitive scientists will explore and exploit what a behavioral perspective on thinking and reasoning has to offer.…”