An Investigation of the Functional Properties of Relational Contextual Cues and Discriminative Stimuli
Martin Finn et al.
What the paper says
Contextual control is a key component of behavioral accounts of complex human behavior. Relational contextual cues afford such contextual control, and are routinely established and employed in experimental analyses of relational responding (i.e., responding to one stimulus based on its relationship with another stimulus). Surprisingly, the functional properties of relational contextual cues have not yet been subjected to systematic experimental analysis. Across several pairs of experiments, we investigated these properties, and in each case compared them to the properties of discriminative stimuli because comparisons with a more well studied stimulus property would be informative. Experiment 1 assessed the sensitivity to counterconditioning and reductions in the contingency between cue occurrence and response opportunity. Experiment 2 assessed the impact of three fixed ratio schedules on the acquisition of the function of relational contextual cue. Experiment 3 investigated the impact of higher-order contextual control. Results indicated that relational contextual cues and discriminative stimuli are equally sensitive to counterconditioning, the reinforcement contingency strength, and higher-order contextual control. These results shed new light on the functional properties of relational contextual cues, which has implications for researchers and practitioners designing protocols to establish patterns of relational responding.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.