Some issues in memory research within behavior analysis

Abstract

The purpose of Article 1 is to introduce some of the major theoretical contribution of cognitive psychology concerning short-term or working memory. The role of neuroscientific research of enhancing our understanding of the phenomena will also be discussed. Finally, we will show how conditional discrimination technique in the form of delayed matching-to-sample procedures can be used in research on short-term memory tasks. Article 2 discusses an experiment were thirty adults were randomly assigned to one of three groups in a single-subject withdrawal design, with three experimental conditions, BAB respectively. The purpose was to examine the probability of responding in accordance with equivalence, as a function of different sample comparison delays in a LS conditional discrimination procedure. The values of the delays were chosen so that the results could be compared to studies by Arntzen (2006), Arntzen et al. (2007), and Eilifsen and Arntzen (2011), and the studies on priming by Posner et al. (1969) and Phillips and Baddeley (1971). The results only partly confirms the results of the aforementioned studies. A second purpose was to examine the effect of exposing participants to different stimulus equivalence procedures, with repeated exposure to one of the procedures. The results show that numbers of trials to criterion was significant lower for all the participants in the repeated procedure, and responses in accordance with stimulus equivalence, was three times higher, indicating a clear repetition, or a carry-over effect