Three experiments used postclass formation within-class preference test performances to evaluate the effects of nodal distance on the relatedness of stimuli in equivalence classes. In Experiment 1, two 2-node four-member equivalence classes were established using the simultaneous protocol in which all of the baseline relations were trained…

Previous research suggests that the Relational Completion Procedure may be an effective alternative procedure for studying derived relational responding. However, the parameters that make it effective, relative to traditional match-to-sample, remain to be determined. The present experiment compared the Relational Completion Procedure and…

If stimulus equivalence is a model of meaning, abstract stimuli should acquire the meaning of meaningful stimuli equivalent to them. In Experiment 1, college students matched faces expressing emotions to arbitrary pictures, forming three classes of equivalent stimuli, each comprising an emotional expression and three arbitrary pictures. Semantic…

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the…

College students were presented with a series of four problems, each presented in four different formats: verbally, in abstract symbols, in negative abstract symbols, and in geometric figures. Problem-solving performance was evaluated in terms of the sequence of questions that a subject asks in order to solve a problem. They were also tested by…