Emergent stimulus relations depend on stimulus correlation and not on reinforcement contingencies.
Emergent stimulus relations can bloom from simple co-occurrence even after you withhold all rewards.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Five adults learned to match Japanese kanji characters in three-member classes. They got points for correct picks during training.
Some comparisons were never reinforced. The team wanted to see if relations would emerge anyway.
What they found
All five people built the trained classes. Four of them also picked the non-reinforced items in tests.
The results say stimulus links, not reward rules, can drive new relations.
How this fits with other research
Feinstein et al. (1988) first showed emergent picks without direct pay. Tepaeru adds proof that even extinguished links can survive.
Rojahn et al. (1994) and Roche et al. (1997) found that once a class forms, conditioning or extinction spreads to every member. The new data say the class can form even when some members were never rewarded.
Bai et al. (2016) looks opposite: they saw that extra rewards for other choices made target behavior harder to extinguish. Both papers agree that real correlations, not the written contingency, steer the outcome.
Why it matters
Check your teaching sets for accidental stimulus pairs. Kids might learn relations you did not reinforce and you never probe. Run emergent-relation tests after match-to-sample lessons, even for items you purposely ignored.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We aimed to investigate whether novel stimulus relations would emerge from stimulus correlations when those relations explicitly conflicted with reinforced relations. In a symbolic matching-to-sample task using kanji characters as stimuli, we arranged class-specific incorrect comparison stimuli in each of three classes. After presenting either Ax or Cx stimuli as samples, choices of Bx were reinforced and choices of Gx or Hx were not. Tests for symmetry, and combined symmetry and transitivity, showed the emergence of three 3-member (AxBxCx) stimulus classes in 5 of 5 human participants. Subsequent tests for all possible emergent relations between Ax, Bx, Cx and the class-specific incorrect comparisons Gx and Hx showed that these relations emerged for 4 of 5 the participants after extended overtraining of the baseline relations. These emergent relations must have been based on stimulus-stimulus correlations, and were not properties of the trained discriminated operants, because they required control by relations explicitly extinguished during training. This result supports theoretical accounts of emergent relations that emphasize stimulus correlation over operant contingencies.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2011 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2011.95-327