On page 30, first full paragraph, there is a description of a natural language event--someone names a ball to a child. It's being used to illustrate mutual entailment. But it seems that the last sentence "the r response in other words, will involve responding to the sound "ball" in terms of the previously experienced functions of actual balls." So that seems to be a description of the transfer of stimulus functions.
Is transfer of stimulus function a more precise term than transformation of stimulus function. Is transfer of stimulus function a subset of transformation of stimulus function that applies with frames of coordination or is it a different thing altogether?
Joanne Steinwachs
Leslie Telfer
Response to initial post-
Just go on reading... (Submitted by Philippe Vuille on August 5, 2006 - 9:28am.)
The response to your question is to be found on pages 31-32 :
«Equivalence research has repeatedly revealed that stimulus functions commonly transfer through the members of equivalence classes.»
Consider the classical example given by Catania (Learning, 4th ed. p. 154) :
«A child has learned to obey a parent's words, go and stop, when crossing with the parent at a traffic intersection. In a separate setting, the child is taught that go and green traffic lights are equivalent and that stop and red traffic lights are equivalent (in other words, go and green become members of one equivalence class and stop and red become members of another). If the discriminative functions of the words go and stop transfer to the respective traffic lights, the child will obey the traffic lights without any additional instruction.»
RFT is not only about equivalence or "coordination frames". In the case of frames such as opposition, the stimulus functions will not be merely transferred but transformed, as is shown in the example on page 32 :
«(...) Suppose a person is trained to selext stimulus B as the "opposite" of stimulus A. Now suppose that A is given a conditioned punishing function, such as by pairing it with a loss of points. It might be predicted that B would then have reinforcing functions (without having that function directly trained), by virtue of its "opposite" relation to the punishing A stimulus (...) It hardly seems right to say that the reinforcing effects "transferred" in such a case, because they were acquired indirectly through the relation of opposition between B and a punisher. It seems more proper to use the term transformation than transfer, and it is for this reason that RFT has adopted transformation of stimulus functions as the general term for this effect. We will still use the term transfer of stimulus functions, but will generally reserve it for situations in which the underlying relation leads to derived functions that are similar to those that were trained or that pre-existed.»
Philippe