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To Dismantle or Not to Dismantle: Components of Derived Relational Responding

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Abstract

The behavior-analytic approach to language and cognition is consistent with parsimony and coherence in explanatory systems within and across fields of science. Some disagreement exists regarding the appropriate composition of the conceptual tool kit that behavior analysts apply to problems in language and cognition, but ultimately these differences in perspective are minor within the context of shared goals and assumptions. This article summarizes two lines of research guided by the analyses of derived relational responding in terms of contingencies or stimulus correlations acting directly upon its components. The two lines of research eventually produced different conclusions regarding the utility of the analysis within the boundaries of the parameters that were studied. Successful prediction and control of DRR should serve to identify strength and boundaries of utility of different levels of analysis, which could lead to theoretical progress.

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Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study. Raw data relating to online supplementary information are available from the author upon request.

Notes

  1. The definition of verbal behavior been a source of debate in the behavior analysis of language and cognition, and will not be reviewed here, but the reader is referred to Gross and Fox (2009) and Normand (2009).

  2. Horne and Lowe (1996) proposed appetitive Pavlovian perceptual functions as the source of automatic reinforcement for echoic response in this situation (a somewhat similar idea was explored empirically by Longano & Greer, 2015). As an alternative, it might be proposed that the echoic response is reinforced via parity (Palmer, 1996, 1998); that is, automatic reinforcement resulting from a match between what is heard (e.g., “wrench”) and what is said (“wrench”) overtly or covertly. The reinforcing potential of that match might be due to prior reinforcement histories (Palmer, 1996), result from conditioning in utero (e.g., Greer et al., 2017), or even have a genetically innate basis (Newman, 2014). Detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this article, as the primary intent here is to point out that automatic reinforcement of an echoic response has been proposed to be responsible for emergent tact control as a result of tact modeling.

  3. According to NH (Horne & Lowe, 1996), intraverbal relations, even if established via unidirectional training contingencies, are inherently bidirectional. This is proposed to be due to a tendency to echo and self-echo, in close succession, auditory stimuli produced by oneself and others.

  4. This influence of conditioned seeing would be consistent with both NH, in which the BiN operant includes conditioned seeing as a component (Horne & Lowe, 1996) and RFT (Barnes, 1994).

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Correspondence to Anna Ingeborg Petursdottir.

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This article does not contain data from human participants or animals; human participant data included as supplementary information were collected in accordance with the ethical standards of the relevant institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Petursdottir, A.I. To Dismantle or Not to Dismantle: Components of Derived Relational Responding. Psychol Rec (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-023-00573-x

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