Analysis of transitivity during conditional relations training in pigeons

• Grant number: 06/04465-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): February 01, 2007
• Effective date (End): September 18, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Gerson Aparecido Yukio Tomanari
• Grantee: Miriam Garcia Mijares
• Host Institution: Instituto de Psicologia (IP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

When trained in conditional relations among stimuli from different sets, an organism may present new conditional relations showing reflexivity, simmetry and transitivity, without any additional training. The formation of stimulus equivalence classes has been demonstrated in humans, but in infrahuman subjects and in pre-verbal humans the evidence is scarce and controversial. One reason for the difficulty in showing stimulus equivalence in infra-humans and pre-verbal humans may be the neglect of the specificities of these populations when using the experimental procedures originated from verbal human studies. The first aim of this project is to evaluate a procedure for the acquisition of conditional relations that would allow the comparison between the acquisition of a set of conditional discriminations related by transitivity and acquisition of another set of conditional discriminations not related by transitivity.