Four homing pigeons were trained over 5 months in a zero-delay, "arbitrary" matching-to-sample procedure with sample and comparison stimuli presented on any of three response keys. Birds were also required to complete a fixed-ratio 10 requirement on both sample and comparison stimuli to terminate their presentation. The procedure resulted in the establishment of relations that were not specifically trained and that can be characterized by the property of transitivity in a stimulus equivalence context. This result was in contrast with the findings obtained from most previous research with nonhuman subjects.Key words: stimulus equivalence, conditional matching to sample, zero-delay matching to sample, transitivity, spatial location, fixed-ratio sample requirements, fixed-ratio comparison requirements, key peck, pigeons Untrained or derived relations among stimuli trained during a conditional discrimination have been studied in various approaches. One possible standard for classifying these various approaches is based on which relations are trained in the original training. With this approach, three types of paradigms are identified, as illustrated in Figure 1 (A, B, and C). With human subjects, all the various derived relations have been shown, demonstrating the formation of stimulus equivalence (Devany, Hayes, & Nelson, 1986;Lazar, Davis-Lang, & Sanchez, 1984;Mackay & Sidman, 1984;Sidman, 1971). For example, if a verbally competent human subject is trained to pick Stimulus B in the presence of Stimulus A and Stimulus C in the presence of Stimulus B (Atype paradigm), the subject will now show derived symmetry (pick A given B and B given C), derived transitivity (A to C), and reflexivity (A to A, B to B, and C to C). These derived relations have been used as the defining characteristics of a phenomenon known as stimulus equivalence (Sidman, 1971;. This phenomenon has been shown not only in adults but also in children and in mentally retarded persons. On the other hand, with nonhuman subjects, although a great deal of effort has been made to investigate stimulus equivalence, the various derived relations have not always been found
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