STIMULUS CONTROL AND BEHAVIORAL CONTRAST IN A COOPERATIVE TASK

Abstract

Metacontingency, defined as a set of interlocking behavioral contingencies that produce an aggregate product maintained by a consequence, is a unit of analysis similar to the triple contingency. Studies in this area have treated the metacontingency as a conditional relation of two terms, disregarding the role of antecedent stimuli. Due to the importance of discriminative stimuli on the emission of behavior, and in an attempt to study the basic processes involved, this study aimed to investigate the effects of the discrimination process in metacontingencies. The procedure involved a collaborative game on a virtual chessboard and defined the aggregated product as the meeting of two knights. The experiment consisted of four phases: Baseline, Discrimination Training, Discrimination Test and Generalization Test. Twenty-two college students, distributed in 11 dyads, participated in the experiment. Each dyad participated in the activity only once. The measures were the rate of the aggregate product over the four phases, the number of movements, and dispersion index. The results indicated the occurrence of differential responding to the stimuli correlated with the different metacontingencies (stimulus control) although generalization test data were unsystematic. Behavioral contrast occurred after the introduction of an extinction condition in the training phase. The number of movements and the dispersion index showed the stereotyped pattern generated by the reinforcement, and variability induced by extinction, both effects observed in operant behavior.Keywords: metacontingency, stimulus control, operant discrimination, discriminative stimulus, behavioral contrast