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An Investigation Of The Five-Term Contingency And The Conditional Control Of Equivalence Relations, Richard W. Serna

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of human operant behavior. One area of study reflecting this interest is the study of the formation of equivalent classes of stimuli by human subjects. The focus of the present research was the study of the conditions under which classes of equivalent stimuli can be inferred to be under conditional control.

In Experiment 1-A, three college students were trained to respond to a balanced five-term contingency via a visual-visual simultaneous matching-to-sample task with two choices of comparison stimuli. Probe tests showed that subjects' behavior could be described as …