Association for Behavior Analysis International

The stimulus control of behavior is a critical aspect of how organisms adjust their behavior to the state of their environment and the survival of animals (including humans) often depends on their ability to perform responses that are appropriate to their circumstances. Therefore the ability to appropriately attend to the important features of a complex environment and perceive their relations is a critical survival skill. Importantly, problems related to the allocation of attending are associated with various psychological disorders ranging from attention deficit to substance abuse. Among the many factors contributing to the allocation and persistence of attending, the relation between patterns of attending and the resultant consequences plays an important role. The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers to discuss current experimental findings and conceptualization regarding the effects of environmental contingencies on stimulus control in humans ranging from associations discrimination and class formations in respondent schedules to eye-movement based observing in operant schedules. These studies reveal both the complexity of attending and observing for stimulus control and the strong need for a unitary theoretical framework to account for the range and diversity of environmental effects on the establishment and persistence of stimulus control.

Associative learning is at the core of several important learning phenomena, notably operant and Pavlovian conditioning. Allan and collaborators have proposed that it could be conceptualized as a perception problem, entailing the application to it the full psychophysical toolbox to quantify a subjects ability to perceive relations between events. This psychophysical framework goes along with a new procedure for the study of associative learning in humans, the streamed-trial procedure, where participants are exposed to rapid flows of stimuli at the end of which a contingency judgment is asked of them. This presentation will review results from an ongoing research project building on Allans pioneering work. Among the conclusions highlighted, (a) Participants are better at perceiving positive contingencies between stimuli; (b) The variability in their is constant; (c) The sensitivity to stimulus contingency cannot be modified through feedback; (d) It relies, at least in the streamed-trial procedure, on attention-dependent visual processing while verbal coding strategies (such as counting stimuli) only play a marginal role.

Researches indicated that stimuli pairing in training is responsible for transfer of discriminative function. The present study evaluated whether transfer of function was a product of temporal contiguity between stimuli or the formation of a functional class. Six college students were exposed to a three-phase procedure: the first phase was a successive discriminative training with three compound stimuli as S+ (A1B1, A1C1, A1D1) and three compound stimuli as S- (A1B2, A1C2, A1D2). The second phase was a successive discriminative training to establish R1 in the presence of B1 and R2 in the presence of B2. The third phase was a test, in extinction, to evaluate whether R1 or R2 would be emitted in the presence of A1, B1, C1, D1, B2, C2, D2 stimuli presented separately and successively. The results showed that 4 of the 6 participants showed R1 in the presence of stimuli from Class 1 and R2 in the presence of stimuli from Class 2. None of the subjects emitted the same response for all the single stimuli presented in the test. Results indicated that transfer of function was probably the product of the formation of functional classes and not a product of temporal contiguity.