Using a conditional discrimination procedure, pigeons were exposed to a nonverbal analogue of qualifying autoclitics such as "definitely" and "maybe." It has been suggested that these autoclitics are similar to tacts except that they are under the control of private discriminative stimuli. Instead of the conventional assumption…

We evaluated the effects of operant discrimination training (ODT) on the vocalizations of 3 boys with autism. We compared ODT to a stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) condition and a control condition in an adapted alternating-treatments design. ODT increased the target vocalizations of all participants compared to the control condition, and its…

An equivalence class is typically established when a subject is taught a set of interrelated conditional discriminations with physically unrelated stimuli and additional, untaught, conditional discriminations are then demonstrated. Interestingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the relations among the stimuli within such a class are not…

A skill essential for successful inclusion in general education settings is the ability to learn by observing others. Research, however, has documented children with autism display significant deficits in the fundamental skills necessary for observational learning. This article outlines the skills essential for observational learning from an…

N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) mediate certain forms of synaptic plasticity and learning. We used a touchscreen system to assess NR2A subunit knockout mice (KO) for (1) pairwise visual discrimination and reversal learning and (2) acquisition and extinction of an instrumental response requiring no pairwise discrimination. NR2A KO mice…

We tested whether teaching control by single stimulus samples in conditional discriminations would result in common control of two-stimuli compound samples, and vice versa. In Experiment 1, 5 participants were first taught four single-sample conditional discriminations. The first conditional discrimination was as follows: given sample stimulus P1,…

One 9-year-old child was taught conditional discriminations between dictated names in Spanish and their corresponding pictures across three stimulus sets while her 10-year-old brother observed. Posttests revealed the emergence of symmetry relations in the form of oral naming skills by both children. (Contains 2 figures.)

Four experiments were conducted to study the contents of human instrumental conditioning. Experiment 1 found positive transfer between a discriminative stimulus (S[superscript D] and an instrumental response (R) that shared the outcome (O) with the response that was originally trained with the S[superscript D], showing the formation of an…

Eighteen undergraduates participated in studies designed to examine the factors that produce transfer of contextual functions to novel stimuli in second-order conditional discriminations. In Study 1, participants selected comparison B1 given sample A1 and comparison B2 given sample A2 in a matching-to-sample procedure. Contextual stimuli X1 or X2…

Two experiments investigated baseline reviews as a relevant variable in reorganization of equivalence classes. After formation of three 4-member classes, participants learned reversals of baseline conditional discriminations and expanded the classes to 5 members each. In Experiment 1, 4 students responded on equivalence probes without baseline…

Small deviations from bilateral symmetry (fluctuating asymmetries) are cues to fitness differences in some animals. Therefore, researchers have considered whether animals use these small asymmetries as visual cues to determine appropriate behavioral responses (e.g., mate preferences). However, there have been few systematic studies of animals'…

To date, only 1 study has evaluated the impact of a Pavlovian drug conditional stimulus (CS) on operant responding. A within-subject operant 1-lever go/no-go (across sessions) design was used to evaluate the impact of Pavlovian contingencies on the discriminative stimulus effects of nicotine (0.4 mg/kg) and ethanol (800 mg/kg) in male Sprague…

We have used a genetically tractable model system, the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster" to study the interdependence between sensory processing and associative processing on learning performance. We investigated the influence of variations in the physical and predictive properties of color stimuli in several different operant-conditioning…