Development of conditional and equivalence relations without differential consequences.
Equivalence can pop up without rewards, but it is fragile—probe every link before you trust it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked adults to play a matching game on a computer. No points, no praise, no buzzers—just pick the card that goes with the sample.
They wanted to know if people would still group the pictures into equivalence classes without any rewards or penalties.
What they found
Some adults did form the classes, but the links were shaky. Transitivity—linking A to C after learning A-B and B-C—often broke down.
Without consequences, equivalence was a coin toss. You cannot assume it will happen.
How this fits with other research
Rojahn et al. (1987) saw strong equivalence in adults when exclusion trials were used. The new study removed all consequences, and the same adults looked lost.
O'Hora et al. (2014) later showed that adding even tiny consequences quickly strengthened derived rules. Together the three papers draw a clear line: consequences are the on-off switch for emergent relations.
Granerud et al. (2021) moved the work to 4-year-olds and added naming. The kids formed classes faster than these adults without rewards, hinting that language can fill the gap when reinforcers are absent.
Why it matters
If you run stimulus-equivalence lessons without checks, your learner might look like they ‘get it’ while the transitive links are missing. Always probe symmetry and transitivity in the same session. If either fails, add reinforcement or mediating cues like names before moving on.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two experiments were conducted to establish conditional stimulus relations without differential consequences and to test for the emergence of other relations. In Experiment 1, 3 adults responded to match-to-sample displays in which sample-comparison pairs were constant while the second comparison presented with each pair changed periodically across trials. No differential consequences followed any comparison selections. All subjects learned conditional relations between constant samples and comparisons, but results of tests for transitivity in those relations were equivocal. In Experiment 2, 4 children were given unreinforced training and testing similar to that provided to the adults in Experiment 1, with procedural refinements. One child learned conditional relations and demonstrated emergent relations that confirmed the development of two four-member equivalence classes. Another child learned the conditional relations but did not demonstrate any emergent relations reliably. A 3rd child, after reinforced training on two conditional relations, learned four new conditional relations without differential consequences and demonstrated symmetry but not equivalence in the trained relations. The 4th child did not learn the conditional relations. These findings emphasize the importance of careful construction of tests for stimulus equivalence and suggest a need for critical analyses of the apparent emergence of untrained stimulus relations on unreinforced tests that has been observed in several stimulus equivalence studies.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1990 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1990.54-225