Association for Behavior Analysis International

The purpose of this symposium was to evaluate two new procedural applications to teach conditional discriminations and form equivalence classes with adult participants. The current methods to establish new conditioned reinforcers may be unreliable and the typical approach to establishing equivalence classes, matching-to-sample training and testing, can be labor intensive and time consuming. The first presentation, entitled “Transfer of Reinforcing Function Facilitated by Differential vs. Common Outcomes” sought to establish new conditional reinforcers via equivalence class formation and differential outcomes. The results indicated that stimuli from an equivalence class containing other, reinforcing stimuli, acquired reinforcing properties and was effective as a reinforcer to establish new classes. The second presentation, entitled “Establishing Equivalence Relations Utilizing a Sorting Procedure” used a stimulus sorting protocol to teach and test for the emergence of new conditional discriminations, indicative of equivalence class formation. The results indicated that teaching via a sorting protocol not only established new equivalence classes but did while substantially decreasing the teaching and testing trials necessary. The results of this symposium are discussed in terms of efficacy of instructional protocols used in more applied settings (e.g., classrooms, etc.).

Advanced. Participants should at least a working knowledge of stimulus equivalence and conditional discrimination training.

Several primary methods for establishing new reinforcers have yielded varied results. Stimulus equivalence procedures, while not traditionally used for such purposes, may prove beneficial. In the present study, two groups (Condition A & B) of three adults completed a series of match-to-complex sample trainings. Condition A participants completed a match-to-complex sample training in which unique reinforcers were utilized for each stimulus class. Following initial training, participants completed an additional training in which stimuli that functioned as discriminative stimuli in the first training were tested for a reinforcing function. Tests for equivalence class formation were conducted via sorting tests. Procedures for Condition B participants were identical to those for Condition A participants except for the reinforcers used. For Condition B participants, across all trainings a common reinforcer was used across stimulus classes. Results for one participant demonstrated via a reinforcer assessment that three different tokens functioned as reinforcers prior to training. Preliminary training data collected suggested that the first match-to-sample training will be successfully completed with the use of unique reinforcers. It is expected that participants trained using differential outcomes will demonstrate greater accuracy across phases, compared to those trained using common outcomes.