4.7 Stimulus Equivalence Example Part 1

Let’s look at a phenomenon known as stimulus equivalence. Stimulus equivalence involves deriving relations of sameness or equivalence and is often studied in the laboratory with arbitrary symbols like these¹. First, a person learns to match one arbitrary visual stimulus (A) to another (B). The stimuli are not actually labeled A and B in the experiment, silly. Whenever stimulus A is presented at the top, picking stimulus B is reinforced.