CONTEXTUAL CONTROL OVER COMPOUND STIMULI: AN APPLICATION TO THE TEACHING OF NUMBERS

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to teach the discrimination between “equal” and “different” for the quantities and written form of various numbers. In the procedure used, a contextual control for conditional discriminations that included compound stimuli was presented. A five year old girl learnt that the choice of one of four stimuli (number one, number two, quantity one, quantity two) depended on the presentation of a contextual stimulus (equal or different) and a conditional stimulus composed of two words (one-quantity, one-number, two-quantity, two-number). Once the eight possible combinations of stimuli were learnt, the contextual stimuli were presented for two new numbers. The results showed the transference of learning without deliberate teaching for two new numbers which included compound stimuli.