Efectos de variar la dimensión del estímulo y la morfología de la respuesta sobre el aprendizaje de discriminación

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the effect of varying the stimuli dimension or the response morphology on the discrimination learning. For a group of subjects, responding to the left lever after a fixed tone or responding to the right lever after a light were followed by water. For a second group, the arrangement was the same except that the light was replaced by an intermittent tone (Experiment 1). It was found that subjects trained with different stimuli dimension (tone vs. light) had a faster acquisition. In Experiment 2, for a group of subjects the first response to the left lever after presenting a fixed tone and pulling a chain after presenting an intermittent tone resulted in the delivery of water; whereas for a second group the conditions were the same except that instead of pulling the chain after the intermittent tone, subjects need to pressed the right lever to obtain water. Subjects trained with morphologically different responses (lever press vs. chain pulling) learned the task in fewer sessions than subjects trained with morphologically similar responses. As a whole, the results are discussed based on the differentiation between discriminated operants supporting the functional equivalence hypothesis.