Effects of repeating or not repeating trials immediately when errors occur during training of equivalence classes with college students

ABSTRACT

To establish baseline conditional relations during equivalence class formation, an opportunity to immediately respond a second time to the same trial following an error is typically not provided in studies with adults of typical development. Rather, the entire trial block is repeated until a specified mastery criterion is met. The present study is the first to compare immediately repeating a trial to not repeating that specific trial when baseline relations training errors occur. In this study, adults of typical development learned two different sets of two 4-member equivalence classes of abstract stimuli. A within-subjects design was used to compare the effects of immediately repeating or not repeating an incorrect trial. Results showed that equivalence classes were learned with similar accuracy and efficiency regardless of condition. However, maintenance of classes was significantly higher for participants in the repeating a trial condition, and participants strongly preferred this condition. Implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Derived relational responding
• error-correction
• match to sample
• one-to-many
• stimulus equivalence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in the study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the university’s Institutional Review Board and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from each individual participant included in the study. All procedures to obtain informed consent were approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board.