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Acquired Equivalence in Non-Human Animals: Origins, Effects, and Mechanisms |
| Monday, May 28, 2007 |
| 1:30 PM–2:20 PM |
| Douglas C |
| Area: EAB; Domain: Basic Research |
| Instruction Level: Intermediate |
| Chair: Timothy A. Shahan (Utah State University) |
| PETER URCUIOLI (Purdue University) |
 Dr. Peter Urcuioli is Professor of Psychological Sciences and Associate Head of Department at Purdue University. He was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire, where he worked with Greg Bertsch on avoidance learning in rats and, later, with Tony Nevin on concept formation in pigeons. Peter did his graduate training at Dalhousie University from 1974 to 1979 with Vern Honig where his interests in discrimination learning and stimulus control solidified. His dissertation showed that pigeons’ differential behavior could serve as a powerful cue for subsequent performance. Following post-doctoral training with Tony Wright at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, Peter joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1981. His research, which has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, has covered a broad range of topics including overshadowing, retrospective versus prospective coding in delayed discriminations, associative processes in the differential outcome effect, the Simon effect, and acquired equivalence and mediated generalization. All have a common, stimulus control theme, which continues in his current research on responses and equivalence classes. Peter has been an Associate Editor for Animal Learning & Behavior and serves on the editorial board of several journals. |
| Abstract: Acquired equivalence is an example of emergent stimulus relations, in which stimuli immediately occasion particular behavior or discriminations despite no explicit reinforcement history for doing so. This effect is not reducible to primary stimulus generalization but, rather, develops from common associations shared by these stimuli with other dissimilar stimuli. Sometimes referred to as non-similarity-based categorization, acquired equivalence does not require language. I will describe a number of examples of this phenomenon in non-human animals with special focus on acquired sample equivalence that arises from the common comparison-response relations inherent in many-to-one (or comparison-as-node) matching-to-sample. In addition to showing behavioral manifestations of acquired equivalence, I will discuss how these manifestations might reflect what Hull (1939) called secondary (or mediated) stimulus generalization, the implications of mediated generalization for the notion of emergent relations, and some recent data on what sorts of stimulus events may, or may not, be included in an acquired equivalence class. |
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