Producing and recognizing analogical relations.

Analogical reasoning is an important component of intelligent behavior, and a key test of any approach to human language and cognition. Only a limited amount of empirical work has been conducted from a behavior analytic point of view, most of that within Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which views analogy as a matter of deriving relations among relations. The present series of four studies expands previous work by exploring the applicability of this model of analogy to topography-based rather than merely selection-based responses and by extending the work into additional relations, including nonsymmetrical ones.

Longitudinal study of the development of derived relations in an infant.

A normally developing child, Charlie (16 months old at the beginning and 27 months old at the end of this study), was tested several times for the derivation of relations over a period of 8 months. In a series of studies Charlie was: (1) taught to match names to pictures or pictures to names and was tested for derived relations of mutual entailment, (2) tested for retention of trained and derived relations after a 2 week delay and for the derivation of mutual entailment relations after a 1 week delay from training, (3) taught to match sounds to pictures and names to pictures and tested for mutual entailment relations and name-sound and sound-name combinatorial entailment relations, and (4) tested for the matching of a novel picture to a novel name ("nonverbal" exclusion) and for subsequent naming of the novel excluded picture ("verbal" exclusion). The results show that Charlie derived mutual entailment relations and showed nonverbal exclusion as early as 17 months.

A test of symmetry and transitivity in the conditional discrimination performances of pigeons.

In a matching-to-sample context, pigeons were taught two conditional discriminations according to one of three equivalence paradigms: train if A, then select B and if B, then select C; train if B, then A and if B, then C; or train if A, then B and if C, then B. Test trials without reinforcement revealed that the conditional relations did not satisfy the symmetrical and transitive properties of an equivalence relation. Apparently, only specific if.