Emergence of visual-visual conditional discriminations.

The team taught preschoolers to name pictures and link spoken names. Then they tested if the kids could match the pictures without more teaching.

They worked with neurotypical children. The goal was to see if tact and intraverbal training would create new visual-visual matches.

Half of the children passed both A-B and B-A visual matches right away. Most kids did not show bidirectional intraverbal naming.

Results were mixed. Some kids got the emergent relations, others did not.

Rosales et al. (2012) used stimulus pairing plus extra examples to finish second-language relations. Their positive outcome shows the 2015 mixed result may need more exemplars.

Carnerero et al. (2014) got 90% emergent tact and selection in kids with autism after simple picture-name pairing. The 2015 study extends that logic to neurotypical kids and adds intraverbal links.

Kim et al. (2023) later showed that mixed-operant instruction creates full bidirectional naming in autism. Their success suggests the 2015 probe-only method was too weak for most kids.

You can jump-start visual matching by first teaching tacts and A→B intraverbals. Expect only about half of neurotypical preschoolers to show emergent symmetry without extra support. If a child fails, add multiple exemplars or mixed-operant trials instead of more probes.