Abstract
How do organisms come to treat dissimilar events as if they are the same, particularly events that have never been related directly? This question has long fascinated philosophers and psychologists. For philosophers the events of interest were ideas, and processes by which ideas became equivalent took place inside the heads of human organisms. They conceived that ideas (A and B) that had never been associated directly but were each associated with a third idea (C) might come to be associated, such that the three ideas were interchangeable. Several psychologists who became interested in this question saw that a range of events—not just “ideas”—could potentially become equivalent to one another as a result of organism—environment interactions (Hulse, Deese, & Egeth, 1975; Jenkins, 1963; Peters, 1935). Some gave the stimulus equivalence construct a central place in their theories of learning (e.g., Hull, 1939; Lawrence, 1963; Miller & Dollard, 1941).
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Green, G., Saunders, R.R. (1998). Stimulus Equivalence. In: Lattal, K.A., Perone, M. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Human Operant Behavior. Applied Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1947-2_8
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