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FUNCTIONAL CLASSES AND EQUIVALENCE RELATIONS
Author(s) -
Sidman Murray,
Wynne Constance K.,
Maguire Russell W.,
Barnes Thomas
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1989.52-261
Subject(s) - transitive relation , equivalence class (music) , psychology , equivalence relation , stimulus (psychology) , functional equivalence , reinforcement , equivalence (formal languages) , class (philosophy) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology , mathematics , combinatorics , pure mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , linguistics , philosophy
Three adult subjects were taught a set of two‐choice simultaneous discriminations, with three positive and three negative stimuli; all possible combinations of positive and negative stimuli yielded nine different pairs. The discriminations were repeatedly reversed and rereversed, the former positive stimuli becoming negative and the former negative stimuli becoming positive. With all subjects, a reversal of the contingencies for one pair of stimuli became sufficient to change their responses to all of the other pairs. The reversals had produced functional stimulus classes. Then, all subjects showed conditional discriminations emerging between members of a functional class; given a sample from one class and comparisons from both classes, they selected the comparison that was in the same class as the sample. Next, 2 of the subjects showed that the within‐class conditional relations possessed the symmetric and transitive properties of equivalence relations; after having been taught to relate new stimuli to existing class members, the subjects then matched other class members to the new stimuli. Subsequent tests of two‐choice discriminations showed that the conditional discriminations had transferred functional class membership to the new stimuli. The 3rd subject, who did not show equivalence relations among functional class members, was also found to have lost the within‐class conditional relations after the equivalence tests.