Premium
A TRANSFORMATION OF RESPONDENTLY CONDITIONED STIMULUS FUNCTION IN ACCORDANCE WITH ARBITRARILY APPLICABLE RELATIONS
Author(s) -
Roche Bryan,
Barnes Dermot
Publication year - 1997
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.1997.67-275
Subject(s) - nonsense , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , audiology , equivalence relation , equivalence (formal languages) , skin conductance , communication , developmental psychology , mathematics , cognitive psychology , pure mathematics , medicine , chemistry , biochemistry , biomedical engineering , gene
Adult male subjects saw a sexual film clip paired with a nonsense syllable (C1). Similarly, an emotionally neutral film clip was paired with a second nonsense syllable (C3). Responses to the nonsense syllables were recorded as skin resistance responses. Subjects were also trained in a series of related conditional discriminations, using the C1 and C3 stimuli, from which the following equivalence relations were predicted; A1‐B1‐C1, A2‐B2‐C2, and A3‐B3‐C3. Some subjects were given matching‐to‐sample (equivalence) tests after the conditional discrimination training (Experiment 1), whereas others were not (Experiment 2). Subjects were tested for a transformation of eliciting functions by presenting the A1 and A3 stimuli, which were related through equivalence to C1 and C3, respectively. Five of the 6 subjects who showed significantly greater conditioned responses to C1 than to C3, also showed significantly greater skin resistance responses to A1 than to A3. Two additional subjects demonstrated a transformation of an eliciting stimulus function in accordance with five‐member equivalence relations (Experiment 3), and another 5 subjects demonstrated similar effects in accordance with the relations of sameness and opposition (Experiment 4).