Analysis of Rule control in Participants Classified as Flexible or Rigid

Abstract

The present study investigated whether maintenance of contingency-discrepant rule-following is more dependet upon the listener experimental history or upon his/her pre-experimental history, inferred from the listener´s responses to a questionnaire about inflexibility. Sixteen university students previously classified as high and low on a rigidity scale were exposed to a matching-to-sample procedure in which respondents pointed to one of three comparison stimuli. After the baseline in Session 1, the contingencies in Session 2 were changed in Session 3, whereas the contingencies in Session 3 were the same in Session 4, which began with a contingency-discrepant rule. In Session 2, pointing was established by contingencies in Condition I and by rules in Condition II: Regardless of the experimental condition, 6 of the 8 “flexible” participants ceased discrepant rule-following in Session 4. The systematic differences observed between performances of the classified flexible and unflexible, support the suggestion that individual differences generated by different pre-experiemental histories are variable related to maintenance or not the discrepant rule-following.