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Talk-Aloud Protocols during Conditional Discrimination Training and Equivalence Class Formation

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Abstract

The primary focus of the present experiment was to study participants’ self-talk during conditional discrimination training and test for the emergence of conditional relations consistent with equivalence. Eighteen adult participants were exposed to either a Many-to-One (MTO) or a One-to-Many (OTM) training structure arranged as a 6-s delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) procedure. During training and testing, participants were asked to talk aloud. Each trial was divided into three time-windows for recording vocal responses. The first time-window was when the sample was presented, the second time-window was the delay following the offset of the sample stimulus until the onset of the comparisons, and the final time-window was when the comparison array was presented. Overall, participants in the OTM condition talked more than participants in the MTO condition. The participants exposed to MTO increased talking during the third time-window from last part of training to test more than the participants in the OTM condition. For 16 of the 18 participants, talking aloud was less than 55% in the second time-window (during the delay). Conversely, talking in the first and third time-windows were higher than 90% in both groups. Thus, it seems that talking is affected by the shift from training to testing to a greater degree when exposed to MTO than OTM. Furthermore, the data indicate that the participants did not need to talk aloud during the delay to respond correctly on DMTS trials.

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Correspondence to Aleksander Vie or Erik Arntzen.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Vie, A., Arntzen, E. Talk-Aloud Protocols during Conditional Discrimination Training and Equivalence Class Formation. Analysis Verbal Behav 33, 80–97 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-017-0081-y

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