Acquired Equivalence and Distinctiveness in Human Discrimination Learning

Evidence for Associative Mediation

Hall, Geoffrey
Mitchell, Chris
Graham, Steven
Lavis, Yvonna

¹Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
²Unilever Research, Wirral, United Kingdom
³School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

⁴Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Geoffrey Hall, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected].

Chris Mitchell is now at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; Steven Graham is now at the National University of Singapore and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore.

This work was supported by Unilever Research. We thank C. Bonardi and P. Quinlan for their insightful comments and criticisms.

Received Date: January 22, 2002; Revised Date: December 12, 2002; Accepted Date: December 16, 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 132(2):p 266-276, June 2003.

In the first stage of Experiments 1–3, subjects learned to associate different geometrical figures with colors or with verbal labels. Performance in Stage 2, in which the figures signaled which of 2 motor responses should be performed, was superior in subjects required to make the same response to figures that had shared the same Stage 1 associate. A third stage of testing showed that the events used as associates in Stage 1 were capable of evoking the motor response trained in Stage 2, an outcome predicted by an associative interpretation of such transfer effects. Experiment 4 provided evidence that the relevant associations can be effective in controlling motor responding even when subjects report an antagonistic relationship between the events.