Stimulus equivalence and transitive associations: A methodological analysis.
Check S-plus, S-minus, and valence control with separate probes or your 'equivalence' data may be junk.
01Research in Context
What this study did
L and colleagues wrote a how-to guide for equivalence tests. They asked: how do we know a new relation is real?
They warned that three hidden cues can fake equivalence. These are S-plus control, S-minus control, and valence control.
The paper lists probe designs that separate each cue. Only clean probes prove true transitive stimulus control.
What they found
The team did not run new birds or kids. They re-examined old data and showed earlier claims were shaky.
When the three controls were pulled apart, many "emergent" relations vanished. True equivalence is rare without tight probes.
How this fits with other research
Barron et al. (2019) later used these exact safeguards while teaching children with autism to match "then-later" and "here-there" pictures. Their skills really generalized, showing the 1984 rules work in clinic rooms.
Badia et al. (1972) already proved that only differential reinforcement gives clean stimulus control. Frame et al. (1984) echo that lesson for equivalence: pick the right probe or you reinforce the wrong cue.
Davison (2018) showed reinforcers can split control between key color and key place. The same split can hide inside equivalence probes, so the same fix applies—test each source alone.
Why it matters
Before you say a client has "emergent" relations, run three quick probe sets. Test S-plus alone, S-minus alone, and valence alone. Only when all three pass can you trust the new skill. This extra five minutes saves you from false positives and wasted teaching time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
When a number of two-stimulus relations are established through training within a set of stimuli, other two-stimulus relations often emerge in the same set without direct training. These, termed "transitive stimulus relations," have been demonstrated with a variety of visual and auditory stimuli. The phenomenon has served as a behavioral model for explaining the emergence of rudimentary comprehension and reading skills, and the development of generative syntactic repertoires. This article considers the range of relations that can arise between a given number of stimuli in a class, the number of directly established two-stimulus relations necessary for the emergence of transitive relations, the forms that training sets of stimuli can take, and the number of transitive two-stimulus relations that can be induced without direct training. The procedures needed to establish and assess transitive stimulus control, the possible interactions between the training and testing procedures, and the constrainst these interactions place upon the analysis of transitive stimulus control are also examined. The present analysis indicates that in a transitivity test, choice among such stimuli may be controlled by (1) the relation between the sample and the positive comparison stimulus (transitive stimulus control), (2) the relation between the sample and the negative comparison stimulus (S- rule control), and (3) possible discriminative properties that may inadvertently be established in the positive and negative comparison stimuli (valence control). Methods are described for distinguishing these three forms of stimulus control.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1984 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1984.42-143