Abstract

CAZETTO, Thalita Filier  and  SELLA, Ana Carolina. Effects of prompts sets in conditional discriminations tasks. Psicol. estud. [online]. 2011, vol.16, n.2, pp. 307-316. ISSN 1413-7372.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1413-73722011000200014.

Conditional discriminations allow that by teaching some behaviors, others will emerge without having to be directly taught. Despite the supposed teaching economy, difficulties have been reported in the establishment of the adequate stimulus control in such discriminations.  The use of prompts, such as demonstrations and/or instructions, can help establishing the adequate stimulus control. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether there would be differences in performance when two sets of prompts were presented. The study included 20 children aged between 9 and 12 years divided into two groups. To the first group, a matching to sample task was presented added to prompts (demonstration and instruction) about the correct comparison stimulus. To the second group the same procedure was presented, but the prompts were about the conditional relation pairs. The results showed that the prompts about the conditional relation pairs yielded better performances.

Keywords : Matching to sample; children; prompts.