The Role of Retention Intervals When Establishing Stimulus Equivalence Using a Stimulus Pairing Procedure

Previous research suggests that increasing retention intervals during conditional discrimination training facilitates stimulus equivalence (SE) responding. Another line of studies have used stimulus parings, instead of conditional discrimination procedures, as the prerequisite for testing for SE. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect of using retention intervals of 500, 6000, and 12000 ms in a stimulus paring procedure, on both directly trained and derived performance assessed using a Go/No-Go procedure. 9 adult participants underwent stimulus-pairing training with the purpose of establishing 12, three member classes, before a Go/No-Go test assessing performance similar to symmetry, transitivity, global equivalence were administered. The importance of the current study lies in the novelty of the experimental procedure, which can illuminate reasons for variable findings surrounding different methods for training prerequisite for SE. The results show that participants respond more in accordance with SE under the long and small delays, relative to the medium delay, thereby partially supporting previous studies on retention intervals with conditional discrimination procedures.