A precursor to the relational evaluation procedure: searching for the contextual cues that control equivalence responding.
Teaching "same" and "different" first makes later equivalence classes form faster and more reliably.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four adults without disabilities learned a new matching game. The game used the words "same" and "different" as buttons to press.
The goal was to see if learning these two labels first would help the adults form new equivalence classes later.
What they found
All four adults passed the equivalence tests after they learned the labels. The labels acted like a key that unlocked derived relations.
Even abstract symbols worked if the trainers first linked them to "same" and "different".
How this fits with other research
Perez et al. (2017) extends this idea. They showed that cues for "opposite," "more," and "less" also travel through equivalence classes.
Stewart et al. (2013) went further. They used arbitrary shapes to control which part of a picture the adults looked at.
Dixon et al. (2021) moved the work to kids with autism. PEAK-E lessons built the same derived skills in a clinical setting.
Chadwick et al. (2000) set the stage. They proved that feedback alone can make derived relational responding grow across new sets.
Why it matters
Before you run an equivalence protocol, teach the learner what "same" and "different" mean. Use real objects, real words, then fade to symbols. This quick step can save hours of trial-and-error later and boost correct emergent responses.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The precursor to the relational evaluation procedure (pREP) is a go/no-go successive discrimination procedure for examining stimulus equivalence. Previous research has shown that it does not readily produce equivalence responding unless some matching-to-sample (MTS) procedures are incorporated into the experimental sequence. Two experiments attempted to identify contextual cues that would generate equivalence responding on the pREP. Experiment 1 examined the effects of using abstract symbols or various verbal labels as response options on the pREP. Only the words same and different, when used as response options, reliably produced equivalence responding across 4 subjects. Experiment 2 examined different pretraining preparations designed to attach the functions of the words same and different to abstract symbols that could then be used as response options on the pREP. The most effective pretraining procedure involved multiple-exemplar training during which subjects were trained to respond to abstract symbols in the presence of pairs of stimuli that were either formally the same or different. The abstract symbols were subsequently used as response options with the pREP, and all subjects reliably demonstrated equivalence responding. The findings suggest that the relations of same and different may be fundamental to equivalence responding. These findings are discussed in terms of what they suggest about the nature of the equivalence phenomenon specifically and derived relational responding more generally.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2001 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2001.76-339