Contextual control with compound stimuli

What is it about?

Contextual control has been described as (1) a five-term contingency, in which the contextual stimulus exerts conditional control over conditional discriminations, and (2) allowing one stimulus to be a member of different equivalence classes without merging them into one. The results presented here are inconsistent with the hierarchical perspective presented in Sidman’s (1986, 1994) contextual control definition that asserts that the contextual stimuli exert conditional control over equivalence classes.

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Why is it important?

The contextual stimulus that conditionally controlled the conditional discriminations appeared to be restricted to some arrangements of the MTS procedure and could not be identified based on the arrangement of the stimuli used in the present study. Therefore, defining contextual control in terms of discriminative stimulus compounds would be more parsimonious than the hierarchical perspective of Sidman's (1986, 1994) definition.