Acquisition and transfer of a conditional discrimination in a sequence of five different functional adjustment criteria

Abstract

Twenty-four undergraduate students, both male and female, between 16 and 18 years of age, took part in an experiment in order to examine the effects of the sequence of training under five functional criteria of differing complexity upon a conditional discrimination task. Participants were assigned to five experimental and one control group (n=4) and were exposed to a second-order matching-to-sample task. Sessions comprised a pre-test, corrective training, transference probes (intramodal, extramodal, extra-relational, and extra-domain), and a post-test. A multiple baseline design was used, in which only one experimental group was trained in all functional criteria and the other four groups were trained in four, three, two or one of the functional criteria, respectively. The control group was not exposed to any of the five training criteria. Even when no training under a specific criterion was provided, all groups were exposed to their respective preand post-test, as well as the control group for all the training conditions. Results showed that the number of correct responses was generally high for all groups in the test sessions and in the training of the first three functional criteria. Conversely, when training supposedly required substitutive linguistic interactions, performance was highly irregular. These results suggest that an accurate performance under non-substitutive functions is not necessary to master a more complex non-substitutive task nor sufficient to master a task that requires substitutive criteria.