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Differences in learning and derivation of arbitrary relationships between young and elderly. Equivalence Relations (ER) are typically derived after learning a series of conditional discriminations. ER have been extensively studied in children and adults, however there is less evidence available when it comes to elderly adults. The objectives of the present wok were 1) To use the Differential Outcomes Effect (DOE) to facilitate conditional discrimination learning, and 2) To compare the learning speed and the ability to derive new relations between elderly and young adults. We found no DOE, but important differences between groups arose. Elderly adults spent about twice as much as young adults to learn the conditional discrimination task (X 2 (1, N=12) = 3.490, p=.031). Also, the elderly derived almost five times less relations than the young adults (X 2 (1, n=12)) = 5.19, p = .022).We conclude that this procedure discriminates between both groups. Also, some alternative procedures are proposed to use the DOE with elderly adults.