Contextual control of emergent equivalence relations.
A simple tone can flip which equivalence class a picture belongs to, giving you a fast way to teach conditional categories.
01Research in Context
What this study did
College students sat at a computer. A high or low tone played through headphones. After the tone, two shapes appeared. Students picked one. If they chose correctly, the screen said "Good."
The trick: one tone meant shape A went with B, the other tone meant A went with C. After many trials, new tests checked if the tone still told them which class each shape belonged to.
What they found
The students learned the rule. When the high tone played, they treated A and B as the same. When the low tone played, they treated A and C as the same. The tone acted like a switch for the equivalence class.
The classes were "emergent" — students had never been directly taught that B and C went together under any tone.
How this fits with other research
Sainsbury (1971) showed that a word paired with reinforcement later made kids press a button more. M et al. used the same lab style and pairing logic, but the tone did not give extra points — it only set the context.
Dal Ben et al. (2019) found that preschoolers kept using passive voice after hearing themselves match a model. Both studies show that auditory cues can steer behavior without extra rewards.
Wahler (1969) showed that home contingencies did not change school behavior. M et al. add the flip side: one stimulus (the tone) can change how other stimuli are grouped, even in the same chair and same session.
Why it matters
You can use a neutral cue — a bell, a clap, a clicker — to tell a learner which set of relations is now "active." One minute the red card means "break," the next minute it means "toilet," and a short sound keeps the classes straight. Try adding a two-second audio cue before you present flashcards or intraverbal sets this week.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three college students in Experiment 1 and 1 student in Experiment 2 learned visual conditional discriminations under contextual control by tones; the visual comparison stimulus that was correct with a given sample stimulus depended on whether a high tone or a low tone was present. Two of the subjects in Experiment 1 then demonstrated the emergence of two sets of contextually controlled three-member classes of equivalent stimuli, and the subject in Experiment 2 showed the emergence of contextually controlled four-member classes; the class membership of each stimulus varied as a function of the tones. Class membership was demonstrated by the subjects' performance of new conditional discriminations that they had never been taught directly. In Experiment 2, the procedures were intended to ensure that the tones exerted second-order conditional control and did not simply form compounds with each of the visual stimuli, but the subject's verbal description of the tasks suggested that this intention might not have been successful. It could not be ascertained, therefore, whether the tones exerted contextual control as independent second-order conditional stimuli or simply as common elements of auditory-visual stimulus compounds.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1989 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1989.51-29