Establishing transfer from identity to arbitrary matching tasks via complex stimuli under testing conditions: a follow-up study

In a previous study, Smeets and Striefel (1994) demonstrated that arbitrary form-color relations may be acquired through nonreinforced exposure to identity matching tasks with color-form complex stimuli. After being trained on a color matching (C-C) task, preschool children received test trials involving chained presentations of two tasks. In the first task, colored forms (CF) served as samples and colors as comparisons (CF-C). In the second task, the forms served as samples and the colored forms as comparisons (F-CF). Subsequent probes revealed that all children conditionally related the forms to the colors (F-C) and vice versa (C-F). The present study examined whether these findings resulted from (a) the requirement to respond discriminatively to both CF elements, (b) the CF stimuli serving as samples and as comparisons, or (c) the chained CF-C and F-CF tasks producing strings of perceptually related stimuli. The results are in support of the first explanation. Implications for drawing inferences of symmetry are discussed.
Research on stimulus equivalence and stimulus class formation has shown that after being trained on multiple conditional discriminations, verbally capable humans as young as 2 years of age typically match [...]