Relational learning in a context of transposition: a review.
Learners often follow the relation, not the single reinforced picture—so plan for transposition errors in your conditional-discrimination lessons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lazareva (2012) looked back at 40 years of lab work on transposition. These are tasks where you teach A > B and later test if the learner picks C > D without training. The paper pulls together animal and human data to ask: what really drives these 'bigger than' choices?
What they found
Two things steer the response: past reinforcement and the relation between the stimuli. If a learner was rewarded for picking the 'larger' one before, that history lingers. At the same time, the brain notices the abstract pattern 'pick the bigger' and can shift it to new pairs.
How this fits with other research
Preston (1994) and Pérez-González et al. (2003) showed that once adults and kids learn A→B and B→C, they instantly pick A→C with no extra training. Lazareva (2012) says the same silent leap happens in transposition, because both tasks ride on relational cues, not rote memorizing.
Fetterman et al. (1989) found that transitive links only stuck for items that had been reinforced. That supports F's point: reinforcement history is half the driver. Without payoff, the relation may not survive.
Roche et al. (1997) muddied the water: early pairings can override later conditional-discrimination training. Lazareva (2012) reconciles the two by saying the 'winner' is whichever cue—old pairing or new contingency—has the richer reinforcement background.
Why it matters
When you run conditional-discrimination programs, watch for transposition errors. A learner might pick the taller cup in a new set even though you never reinforced that specific cup. Before you re-teach, check if the choice is based on an old 'pick bigger' rule. If it is, add brief exemplars that break the pattern or reinforce the target relation heavily. This saves trials and keeps your stimulus classes clean.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Probe one untrained 'bigger than' pair after your regular matching lesson; if the learner gets it right, you know relational control is in play—adjust your teaching set accordingly.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
In a typical transposition task, an animal is presented with a single pair of stimuli (for example, S3+ S4-, where plus and minus denote reward and nonreward and digits denote stimulus location on a sensory dimension such as size). Subsequently, an animal is presented with a testing pair that contains a previously reinforced or nonreinforced stimulus and a novel stimulus (for example, S2-S3 and S4-S5). Does the choice of a novel S2 instead of previously reinforced S3 in a testing pair S2-S3 indicate that the animal has learned a relation (i.e., "select smaller")? This review of empirical evidence and theoretical accounts shows that an organism's behavior in a transposition task is undoubtedly influenced by prior reinforcement history of the training stimuli (Spence, 1937). However, it is also affected by two other factors that are relational in nature-a similarity of two testing stimuli to each other and an overall similarity of the testing pair as a whole to the training pair as a whole. The influence of the two latter factors is especially evident in studies that use multiple pairs of training stimuli and a wide range of testing pairs comprising nonadjacent stimuli (Lazareva, Miner, Young, & Wasserman, 2008; Lazareva, Wasserman, & Young, 2005). In sum, the evidence suggests that both prior reinforcement history and relational information affect an animal's behavior in a typical transposition task.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2012 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2012.97-231