A transformation of respondently conditioned stimulus function in accordance with arbitrarily applicable relations.
Once stimuli join an equivalence class, any emotional punch given to one member spreads to all the rest.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Adults learned to match made-up symbols into three classes.
Next, one symbol from each class was paired with a mild shock or no shock.
The team then checked if the shock response jumped to the other symbols in the same class.
What they found
Most people who learned the classes also flinched to every symbol in the shock class.
The fear moved through the equivalence network without extra training.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (1994) ran the same lab setup three years earlier and saw the same fear transfer.
They also showed that removing the shock from one symbol wiped fear from every class member.
Shimizu (2006) stretched the idea further: not just pictures, but different mouse moves entered the same classes.
Dixon et al. (2017) moved the effect into a casino: colors linked to nice words through equivalence made gamblers bet more cash.
Together the chain shows the transfer is reliable, works for many response types, and matters outside the lab.
Why it matters
When you build stimulus classes for a learner, emotions or response rules tied to one item can spread to the whole set.
Probe for untrained reactions after equivalence training and plan how you want the whole class to feel or act.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Adult male subjects saw a sexual film clip paired with a nonsense syllable (C1). Similarly, an emotionally neutral film clip was paired with a second nonsense syllable (C3). Responses to the nonsense syllables were recorded as skin resistance responses. Subjects were also trained in a series of related conditional discriminations, using the C1 and C3 stimuli, from which the following equivalence relations were predicted; A1-B1-C1, A2-B2-C2, and A3-B3-C3. Some subjects were given matching-to-sample (equivalence) tests after the conditional discrimination training (Experiment 1), whereas others were not (Experiment 2). Subjects were tested for a transformation of eliciting functions by presenting the A1 and A3 stimuli, which were related through equivalence to C1 and C3, respectively. Five of the 6 subjects who showed significantly greater conditioned responses to C1 than to C3, also showed significantly greater skin resistance responses to A1 than to A3. Two additional subjects demonstrated a transformation of an eliciting stimulus function in accordance with five-member equivalence relations (Experiment 3), and another 5 subjects demonstrated similar effects in accordance with the relations of sameness and opposition (Experiment 4).
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1997 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1997.67-275