Abstract
The current study evaluated whether college students’ performance on visual–visual matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks were differentially affected by learning to verbally relate the names of visual stimuli. During Experiment 1, eight college students learned to tact arbitrary stimuli, followed by intraverbal training that either related the names of these stimuli (e.g., A1B1C1; class-consistent), or related irrelevant names. Participants were subsequently exposed to baseline training, and equivalence tests. During Experiment 2, eight participants received intraverbal training that included names that were either consistent or inconsistent with the to-be-trained visual stimulus classes. During Experiment 3, eight participants received consistent and inconsistent intraverbal training prior to tact training. In all experiments, class-consistent intraverbal training yielded fewer trials to criterion, and fewer errors during MTS baseline training. Class inconsistent intraverbal training led to most errors during MTS training with corresponding low yields in equivalence tests, whereas the tact and intraverbal training sequence did not seem to differentially affect training and testing performances. These results suggest that participants’ history of verbally relating stimuli together influences outcomes on MTS training and performance on tests for emergent relations.
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All data reported in this study are stored in the Verbal Behavior Research Laboratory at California State University, Sacramento. These data are available upon request from the contacting author.
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The authors of the current study report no conflict of interest. All participants signed an informed consent describing the procedures as approved by California State University-Sacramento’s Institutional Review Board.
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This study is based on a thesis submitted by the first author under the supervision of the fourth author to the Department of Psychology at California State University, Sacramento in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an M.A. degree in Psychology: Applied Behavior Analysis. We thank Erik Godinez, Jillian Sordello, and Sarah Kong for their assistance with data collection, as well as Paula Braga-Kenyon, Megan Heinicke, and Dave Palmer for their feedback.
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Chastain, A.N., Luoma, S.M., Love, S.E. et al. The Role of Irrelevant, Class-Consistent, and Class-Inconsistent Intraverbal Training on the Establishment of Equivalence Classes. Psychol Rec 72, 383–405 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-021-00492-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-021-00492-9