Emergent simple discrimination established by indirect relation to differential consequences.
Probe for new simple discriminations after conditional training; they can emerge without extra teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught adults with and without intellectual disability a simple matching game.
First they learned if-A-then-pick-B and if-B-then-pick-C.
Later, without any new teaching, the researchers asked them to pick between A and C.
What they found
Every person chose C when shown A, even though that pair was never trained.
The choice paid off because C had been linked to snacks during earlier trials.
A new simple discrimination had emerged from the trained conditional links.
How this fits with other research
Moss et al. (2009) extends this idea by showing the new choice can flip back again. They swapped which stimulus paid off and the subjects switched immediately, proving emergent control is reversible.
Gulley et al. (1997) came first and set the stage. They showed that giving one stimulus more reinforcers makes it win the control contest, foreshadowing why C in the 1988 study grabbed control.
LeBlanc et al. (2003) adds that richer payoff schedules also make the new discrimination tougher to disrupt, so the emergent C choice should hold up when you later test under distraction.
Why it matters
You can build untaught simple discriminations by chaining conditional relations that end in reinforcement. After teaching if you see “toothbrush” pick “paste” and if “paste” pick “rinse,” probe to see if the learner now picks “rinse” when shown “toothbrush.” If it works, you saved teaching time and strengthened stimulus classes that make instruction more efficient.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three experiments examined a discrimination training sequence that led to emergent simple discrimination in human subjects. The experiments differed primarily in their subject populations. Normally capable adults served in the first experiment, preschool children in the second, and mentally retarded adults in the third. In all experiments, subjects learned a simple simultaneous discrimination: When visual stimuli A1 and A2 were displayed together, reinforcers followed selections of A1, the S+, but not A2, the S-. The subjects also learned a conditional discrimination taught with an arbitrary visual-visual matching-to-sample procedure. Comparisons were two additional visual stimuli, B1 and B2, and samples were A1 and A2. Reinforcers followed selections of B1 in the presence of A1 and of B2 in the presence of A2. After the simple-discrimination and conditional-discrimination baselines had been acquired, B1 and B2 were displayed alone (without a sample) on probe trials. Subjects had never been taught explicitly how to respond to such displays. Nonetheless, they almost always selected B1, which was involved in a conditional relation with A1, the stimulus that served as S+ on the simple-discrimination trials. This outcome suggested the formation of stimulus classes during conditional-discrimination training. Through class formation, B1 and B2 had apparently acquired stimulus functions similar to those shown by A1 and A2 on simple-discrimination trials, thereby leading to emergent selections of B1 on the probes.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1988.50-1