Effects of Training Structures on Stimulus Equivalence – An Overview

The order stimuli are presented in a conditional discrimination procedure is called training structure and have shown to affect the formation of equivalence classes. The three most frequently used is called many-to-one (MTO), one-to-many (OTM), and linear series (LS). This poster presents an overview of experiments that have investigated the effect of training structures on emergent responding. These experiments vary in regards to class size, number of classes, number of comparison stimuli, types of stimuli, participants, design, and what sort of instruction have been given. Despite these variations, there seems to be an overall tendency that MTO produces a higher outcome in tests with children and people with developmental disabilities and that OTM produces a higher outcome in tests with adults. Other experiments show little or no difference between MTO and OTM concerning emergent responding. The LS training structure has shown to be the least efficient out of the three structures.