Propriedades Temporais do Gradiente de Indução Comportamental

Abstract

Behavioral induction is a proposal that aims to give a unified explanation for respondent and operant phenomena and consists, generically, in the facilitation of the reflex function of a stimulus by another, due to a correlation between them. In a recent study with lists of words, Sarmiento (2017) evaluated the effects of induction through the relative position of the verbal stimuli. In this study, the frequency of responses formed a bidirectional gradient. The present study proposed to evaluate better the temporal properties of this gradient, using two types of tasks. The experiment had 30 participants(17 women and 13 men whose ages were between 18 and 37 years old) distributed in two experimental conditions, Clicks and Causal Scale. Both groups underwent six cycles of observation and testing. During the observation phase, various stimuli were temporally correlated to a star (stimulus-facilitator) with diferente types of delay, analogously to direct and reverse pavlovian conditioning. In the Click group, the test consisted in clicking on the stimuli to make the star appear. In the Scale group, the participants should rating how much the stimuli caused the presence of the star in the observation phase. The mean results of the groups showed effects of the correlations in the form of a bidirectional gradient. Analysis of categories formed by individual profiles evidenced both excitatory and inhibitory effects of the reverse conditioning.