APA Citation
Reilly, T., Whelan, R., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2005). The effect of training structure on the latency responses to a five-term linear chain. The Psychological Record, 55(2), 233-249.
Publication Topic
ACT: Empirical
Publication Type
Article
Language
English
Keyword(s)
nodal distance, all-more, linear chain
Abstract
The authors, researchers at the National University of Ireland, conducted the current experiment to investigate the effect of differential training histories on responses to a 5-term linear chain of nonsense syllables.
Stimulus relations of More-than and Less-than were first brought under contextual control. Participants were then exposed to one of three training structures, in which each training structure was defined by the trial types that were presented: Less-More (AC | E>D), All-Less (AA | C>B | D>C | E>D. The contextual cues served as sample stimuli, and two nonsense words as comparison stimuli. Twenty unreinforced probe trials were subsequently administered on all possible derived relations: directly trained, mutually entailed and one-, two- and three-node combinatorially entailed relation types. Comparisons of response latencies among one-, two-, and three-node combinatorially entailed relations, for accurate performances on all 20-test trials, indicated that the former produced significantly longer latencies than the latter two relations. Comparisons of response latencies across the three training structures indicated that latencies were significantly lower in the All-More condition relative to both the Less-More and the All-Less condition. The effects of nodal distance are readily predicted by both associative accounts and Relational Frame Theory, but the effect of training structure is readily predicted only by the latter theory. The reported findings are also broadly in accordance with previous studies on relational inferences reported in the literature from mainstream cognitive psychology.
The procedure described in the Less-More training structure has since been employed in other experiments that investigated transfer of consequential functions. An uncorrected proof of the in-press article is available from Robert Whelan.