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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Results of numerous human imaging studies and nonhuman neurophysiological studies on "reward" highlight a role for frontal, striatal, and thalamic regions in operant learning. By integrating operant and functional neuroimaging methodologies, the present investigation examined brain activation to two types of discriminative stimuli correlated with…

A model of conditional discrimination performance (Davison & Nevin, 1999) is combined with the notion that unmeasured attending to the sample and comparison stimuli, in the steady state and during disruption, depends on reinforcement in the same way as predicted for overt free-operant responding by behavioral momentum theory (Nevin & Grace, 2000).…