Dixon, M. R., Rehfeldt, R. A., Zlomke, K. R., & Robinson, A. (2006). Exploring the development and dismantling of equivalence classes involving terrorist stimuli. Psychological Record, 56, 83-103.
The present paper describes 2 studies that present conceptual interpretation and experimental findings involving developing and dismantling of equivalence classes consisting of terrorist stimuli. In the first study. 8 United States citizen participants were trained to match nonterrorist stimuli to American and terrorist images. Afterwards, participants were tested derived relations between American and terrorist stimuli. Results revealed all participants had a high probability of making predictable responses across culturally framed stimuli during a pretest match American to American and terrorist to terrorist), yet training, made fewer culturally controlled responses during posttest. The second study examined the acquisition rate resulting equivalence test performance of 7 United States citizen participants who received training with 3 sets of visual stimuli
consisted of (a) terrorist, (b) mixed terrorist/American, and neutral (flowers) images. Most participants acquired the relations involving the terrorist stimuli in fewer trials and scored with higher accuracy during testing when compared to their performance the other two sets (mixed terrorist/American, flowers). Implications for various theories of stimulus equivalence are discussed.