Acquisition of a conditional discrimination under different correspondence training histories

Abstract

Correspondence training is a procedure used to promote, eliminate, weaken or increment a target behavior through the verbalization of future or past correspondent behaviors. In this experiment, a second-order matching-to-sample task was modified to train subjects from two different school populations into different correspondence training histories (saying-doing, doing-describing and saying-describing) in order to analyze the effects of correspondence training on acquisition and generalization of the conditional discrimination. Correspondence training interfered with the acquisition of matching to sample and those subjects who learnt the conditional discrimination did it under the transfer test condition. These results suggest that the establishment of correspondence among what a subject says he is going to do, what he does and what he describes that did may be associated to functional intervention of feedback, that is, to the way feedback promotes that a factor or the relation of two factors of the matching-to-sample task appears with a greater relative weight than the other elements of the contingencial relations trained.