Overtraining increases the strength of equivalence relations.

Renato Bortoloti,Julio C De Rose,Mariéle Diniz Cortez,Naiene Pimentel,Naomi Cristina Rodrigues

doi:10.3922/j.psns.2013.3.13

Abstract

Abstract The present study investigated whether overtraining of the conditional discriminations that are the prerequisites of equivalence class formation strengthens the relations among stimuli in an equivalence class. Two groups of college students formed equivalence classes that consisted of faces that expressed emotions (A) and arbitrary stimuli (B, C, D, and E). The overtraining group had twice as many training trials as the regular training group. For participants who formed equivalence classes, relational strength was evaluated by the generalization of expressed emotions from the A to the D stimuli, which was measured using a semantic differential. An untrained control group showed semantic differential scores that were positive for happy faces, negative for angry faces, and neutral for the D stimuli. For the experimental groups, the D stimuli, when included in equivalence classes, produced scores that were similar to those produced by the equivalent faces. The overtraining group, however, had average values closer to the values of the faces than the regular training group. These results indicate that the amount of training is an experimental parameter that influences the strength of relations between stimuli that are found to be equivalent in matching-to-sample tests.

Highlights

Stimulus equivalence has been proposed as a behavioral model of semantic meaning (e.g., Sidman, 1986, 1994; Sidman & Tailby, 1982)
Of the 17 participants in each group, 11 in the regular training group and 10 in the overtraining group exhibited the emergence of the BE and EB relations, which were indicative of the formation of equivalence classes comprising faces and arbitrary stimuli
This study investigated whether overtraining our laboratory showed high yield when pictorial of baseline relations could influence the strength of stimuli were included in the matching to sample training equivalence relations

Summary

Introduction

Stimulus equivalence has been proposed as a behavioral model of semantic meaning (e.g., Sidman, 1986, 1994; Sidman & Tailby, 1982). Bortoloti and de Rose (2009) showed that stimuli originally classified as “meaningless” tend to be classified differently when they are involved in equivalence classes that include meaningful stimuli. Bortoloti and de Rose (2009) showed that the similarity between evaluations of the arbitrary stimuli and faces equivalent to them decreased as the nodal number ( known as nodal distance) increased, apparently supporting previous findings by Fields and colleagues (e.g., Fields, Adams, Verhave, & Newman, 1993; Fields, Landon-Jimenez, Buffington, & Adams, 1995; Moss-Lourenco & Fields, 2011). Bortoloti and de Rose compared groups that formed classes after training with simultaneous matching with groups that formed classes after training with 2-s delayed matching They found that the participants in the groups trained with delayed matching evaluated the arbitrary stimuli as more similar to the equivalent faces than the participants in the groups trained with simultaneous matching. Bortoloti and de Rose concluded that this higher level of correspondence between evaluations was likely attributable to a strengthening of the equivalence relations determined by the delayed matching procedure

Methods

Results

Conclusion