Unit 9 Terms and Concepts

Review Chapter 6 Terms:

Stimulus Equivalence – the emergence of accurate responding to an untrained unreinforced stimulus– stimulus relations following the reinforcement of responses to some stimulus– stimulus relations.

Reflexivity – a type of stimulus to stimulus relation in which the learner, without any prior training or reinforcement for doing so, selects a comparison stimulus that is the same as the sample stimulus (ex. A = A).

Symmetry – a type of stimulus to stimulus relationship in which the learner, without prior training or reinforcement for doing so, demonstrate the reversibility of matched sample and comparison stimuli (ex. A = B, then B = A).

Transitivity – an untrained stimulus-stimulus relation that it emerges as a product of training to other stimulus-stimulus relations. (ex. if A = and B = C, then A = C)

Match to Sample (MTS) – a procedure for investigating conditional relations and stimulus equivalence. A match to sample begins with the participant making a response that presents or reveals the sample stimulus. With two or more comparison stimuli presented, the participate selects one of the comparison stimuli, where those that match the sample stimulus are reinforced.

Derived Stimulus Relations – a relation between two or more stimuli that is not directly trained or taught and is not based solely on the physical properties of the stimuli. (Example – if a basketball is bigger than a golf ball, but a marble is smaller than a golf ball, then you can derive that a marble is smaller than a basketball given that relation.)

Arbitrary Stimulus Class – antecedent stimuli that evoke the same response but do not resemble each other in physical form or share a relational aspect such as bigger or under (e.g. Peanuts, cheese, and chicken are members of an arbitrary stimulus class if they even took the response “sources of protein”.)

Feature Stimulus Class – stimuli that share common physical forms or structures (example: made from wood, four legs, blue) or common relative relationships (example: bigger then, hotter then, higher then, next to).

Relational Frame Theory – a behavioral account of human language and cognition grounded in rule-governed behavior and derived stimulus relations that extends, and at times, challenges concepts of verbal behavior.

Relational frame – a hypothesized unit that permits one to describe the relationships between new entities based on previous experience (Vandenboss, 2015).

Relational responding – a response to one stimulus based upon its relation to another stimulus or set of stimuli.

Generalized Operant Class – a class of responses that serve the same function in which the form ( topography) of the response varies considerably.

References:

Cooper, J.O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2007). Applied behavior analysis (2nd ed.). Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education

Vandenboss, G.R. (Ed.) (2015). APA dictionary of psychology (2nd ed). Washington, D.C.:

American Psychological Association.