Facilitation of the equivalence - equivalence responding

article about «emergent» or derived behaviour. His work demonstrated that when verbal humans learned different arbitrary conditional discriminations sharing common elements (e.g., A-B and B-C), they could later relate those stimuli in untrained but predictable ways. Barnes, Hegarty and Smeets (1997) proved that this type of training could produce further outcomes. Participants later exposed to a non-reinforced matching to sample procedure with compound stimuli consistently matched equivalent samples with equivalent comparisons and non-equivalent samples with non-equivalent comparisons. For example, after training A1-B1-C1, A2-B2-C2 and A3-B3-C3, in the presence sample A1B1 participants choose A2C2 as comparison instead of A3B2 (equivalence-equivalence), while in the presence of A2C3 they choose A3B2 (non-equivalencenon-equivalence). This behaviour was generally labelled as Equivalence-Equivalence (Eq-Eq). As the authors noted, Eq-Eq behaviour (relating relations) closely resembles human analogical reasoning, despite some arguable differences (e.g., Carpentier, Smeets, & Barnes-Holmes, 2003a). The experimental paradigm of Eq-Eq responding was later refi ned and extended as a behaviour analytical model of human analogical reasoning (Carpentier et al., 2003a; Carpentier, Smeets, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2004; Lipkens & Hayes, 2009; Stewart, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2004; Stewart, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2001, 2002). See Stewart & Barnes-Holmes (2004) for a review. In these works, EqEq was found within a broad variety of experimental conditions: different stimuli, different number of classes and class members, and different training and testing procedures. See also García, Psicothema 2011. Vol. 23, no 3, pp. 407-414 ISSN 0214 9915 CODEN PSOTEG www.psicothema.com Copyright © 2011 Psicothema