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ON THE ROLE OF COVARYING FUNCTIONS IN STIMULUS CLASS FORMATION AND TRANSFER OF FUNCTION
Author(s) -
Markham Rebecca G.,
Markham Michael R.
Publication year - 2002
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.2002.78-509
Subject(s) - stimulus (psychology) , respondent , stimulus control , psychology , skin conductance , neutral stimulus , audiology , communication , neuroscience , cognitive psychology , medicine , biomedical engineering , political science , law , nicotine
This experiment investigated whether directly trained covarying functions are necessary for stimulus class formation and transfer of function in humans. Initial class training was designed to establish two respondent‐based stimulus classes by pairing two visual stimuli with shock and two other visual stimuli with no shock. Next, two operant discrimination functions were trained to one stimulus of each putative class. The no‐shock group received the same training and testing in all phases, except no stimuli were ever paired with shock. The data indicated that skin conductance response conditioning did not occur for the shock groups or for the no‐shock group. Tests showed transfer of the established discriminative functions, however, only for the shock groups, indicating the formation of two stimulus classes only for those participants who received respondent class training. The results suggest that transfer of function does not depend on first covarying the stimulus class functions.