Emergence of Conditional Discriminations after Constructed-Response Matching-to-Sample Training

• Published in: The Psychological record Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 509 - 520
• Main Authors: Calcagno, Solange, Dube, William V., De Faria Galvão, Olavo, Sidman, Murray
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Gambier, OH Kenyon College 01.10.1994; The Association for Behavior Analysis International; Denison University, etc; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Associative Processes; Autism; Biological and medical sciences; Children; Cognition & reasoning; Color; Conditioned response; Conditioning; Discrimination training; Eyes & eyesight; Feedback; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grade 2; Grade 5; Grade 6; Human; Learning disabled people; Learning. Memory; Mathematics Skills; Paired-association learning; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading Comprehension; Reading Skills; Visual feedback; Human; Visual stimulus; Acquisition process; Vision; Feedback regulation; Instrumental conditioning; Perception; Matching task; Experimental study; Discrimination task
• ISSN: 0033-2933; 2163-3452
• DOI: 10.1007/BF03395141

Mackay (1985) reported that subjects were able to match printed words to colors after learning to construct the color names from a pool of letters. Visual feedback from the constructed color names might have been responsible for the emergent matching to sample. In this study we prevented visual feedback during the construction procedure. Also, in matching-to-sample tests Mackay's subjects might simply have reached for the first letter of a comparison name, as if to begin construction, and a selection of the whole word would have been recorded. In this study, subjects constructed combinations of three arbitrary forms, with each combination composed of a different sequence of the same three forms. In the subsequent matching-to-sample test, subjects could not select a comparison on the basis of a single element because all comparisons were made up of the same elements. Even with feedback and element sequence controlled, the subjects showed nearly perfect performances in the matching-to-sample tests. These results indicated that the emergent matching-to-sample performances did not require visual feedback from the constructed stimuli and were not artifacts of the sequence of elements in the comparison stimuli.