Incongruous stimulus pairing and conditional discrimination training: effects on relational responding

In Experiment 1, 5 subjects were exposed to a stimulus-pairing procedure in which two nonsense syllables, identified by a letter-number code as A1 and C2, each predicted the onset of a sexual film clip, and the nonsense syllables A2 and C1 each predicted the onset of a nonsexual film clip. Subjects were then exposed to a matching-to-sample test in which the nonsense syllables A1 and A2 were presented as sample stimuli and C1 and C2 were presented as comparison stimuli and vice versa (i.e., C stimuli as samples and A stimuli as comparisons). All subjects matched A1 with C2 and A2 with C1. Subjects were then trained on the conditional discriminations A1-B1, A2-B2, B1-C1, B2-C2, after which the matching-to-sample test was again administered. All subjects continued to match A1 with C2 and A2 with C1 in accordance with the earlier stimulus-pairing contingencies. An additional 5 subjects were exposed first to conditional discrimination training and testing before being exposed to the incongruous stimulus pairing and matching-to-sample testing. Under these conditions, 4 of the 5 subjects always matched A1 with C1 and A2 with C2. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1, except that a matching-to-sample test was not administered following the initial training procedure. Under these conditions, matching-to-sample test performances were controlled by the contingencies that had immediately preceded the test. Experiment 3 indicated that initial matching-to-sample test performances were unlikely to change, even after repeated exposure to incongruous training and testing. Experiment 4 demonstrated that pretraining with unrelated stimulus sets increased the sensitivity of matching-to-sample test performances to incongruous contingencies when they were similar in format to those arranged during pretraining. These data may have implications for a behavior-analytic interpretation of attitude formation and change.     

The Behavior of Organisms?

The Psychological Record - The term & #x2018;organism & #x2018; enjoys a revered place within the vocabulary of behavior analysis, most notably perhaps within the title of...     

Foundationalism with infinite regresses of probabilistic support

There is a long-standing debate in epistemology on the structure of justification. Some recent work in formal epistemology promises to shed some new light on that debate. I have in mind here some recent work by David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg, hereafter “A&P”, on infinite regresses of probabilistic support. A&P show that there are probability distributions defined over an infinite set of propositions {\(p_{1}, p_{2}, p_{3}, {\ldots }, p_{n}, {\ldots }\}\) such that (i) \(p_{i}\) is probabilistically supported by \(p_{i+1}\) for all i and (ii) \(p_{1}\) has a high probability. Let this result be “APR” (short for “A&P’s Result”). A&P oftentimes write as though they believe that APR runs counter to foundationalism. This makes sense, since there is some prima facie plausibility in the idea that APR runs counter to foundationalism, and since some prominent foundationalists argue for theses inconsistent with APR. I argue, though, that in fact APR does not run counter to foundationalism. I further argue that there is a place in foundationalism for infinite regresses of probabilistic support.     

A contemporary behavior analysis of anxiety and avoidance

Despite the central status of avoidance in explaining the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, surprisingly little behavioral research has been conducted on human avoidance. In the present paper, first we provide a brief review of the empirical literature on avoidance. Next, we describe the implications of research on derived relational responding and the transformation of functions for a contemporary behavioral account of avoidance, before providing several illustrative research examples of laboratory-based analogues of key clinical treatment processes. Finally, we suggest some challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for behavioral research on anxiety and avoidance.     

Is Explanatoriness a Guide to Confirmation? A Reply to Climenhaga

We (2013, 2014) argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr(H | O & E) = Pr(H | O). We defended this screening-off thesis (SOT) by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga (Philos Sci, forthcoming) argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called “SOT*”, and contends that it too gives the wrong result. We here reply to Climenhaga’s arguments and suggest that SOT provides a criticism of the widely held theory of inference called “inference to the best explanation”.     

Competing Contingencies Over Derived Relational Responding: A Behavioral Model of the Implicit Association Test

The Psychological Record - Subjects were exposed to a word-picture association training phase in which each of 2 arbitrary nonsense syllables printed in blue and red font, respectively, were paired...     

Concurrent task performance enhances low-level visuomotor learning

Visuomotor association learning involves learning to make a motor response to an arbitrary visual stimulus. This learning is essential for visual search and discrimination performance and is reliant upon a well-defined neural circuit in the brain that includes the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampal formation. In the present study, we investigated the possible role of attentional processes during such learning using dual-task interference. A motor, verbal, or perceptual concurrent task was performed during the learning/training block of a simple visual discrimination task. Contrary to expectation, the dual-task groups showed improved learning and learning-dependent performance compared with untrained control and non-dual-task trained groups. A second experiment revealed that this effect did not appear to be due to increased arousal level; the inclusion of alerting tones during learning did not result in facilitation. These findings suggest that the engagement of attention, but not arousal, during the acquisition of a visuomotor association can facilitate this learning and its expression.