Association for Behavior Analysis International

Matching-to-sample (MTS) tasks entailing positive reinforcement contingencies have been the most common procedures implemented to study conditional discrimination and a wide range of related behavioral processes (e.g., memory, categorization, and stimulus equivalence). Aware of the lack of studies that have demonstrated conditional discrimination phenomena primarily via aversive contingencies (punishment or negative reinforcement), we designed an MTS task in which stimulus control is established and maintained via a negative reinforcement contingency. On a given trial, participant chooses one of three comparison stimuli (trigrams) in the presence of a sample stimulus that consists of an image with violent content. Correct sample-comparison matching produces immediate removal of all stimuli and that a progress bar decreases one step. Consistent correct matching for a given sample across trials prevents future presentation of this stimulus during an ongoing phase. Incorrect responses produce that the aversive sample remains on the screen for a 5-s forced period. Study 1 tested the effects of using two different types of aversive images as samples: Images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2008), and images related to the Colombian armed conflict. Study 2 explored differences in acquisition of conditional discriminations via positive reinforcement, punishment, and negative reinforcement.

Learning transfer plays an important role for acquisition of new behavior. It could also be seen as a form of generalization. Previous studies have shown that errorless learning seems to enhance learning transfer on subsequent trial-and-error discrimination learning. Errorless learning is a discrimination procedure in which errors made on S- are diminished or avoided. Nonetheless, learning transfer has not been studied across different kind of discrimination learning set. It is not known how errorless learning seems to facilitate subsequent learning. The aim of our study was to evaluate whether learning transfer would operate across different stimuli visual properties and learning procedures. Three groups of twenty participants were designed. The first group did two trial-and-error learning procedure. The second group started with a trial-and-error procedure and then did an errorless learning procedure. Finally, the third group did two errorless learning procedures. In the first condition, S+ and S- were different according to hue. In the second condition, S+ and S- differed in saturation. The task was designed in order to be difficult, thus the S+ and S- were closed across a physical continuum. This study has implication in educational settings in which failure in learning is generally seen as intrinsic to the learner. Moreover, it could enhanced our knowledge about learning failure but also learning facilitation for people with autistic spectrum disorder and learning disabilities.