Electroencephalography (EEG) in the Study of Equivalence Class Formation. An Explorative Study

Abstract

Teaching arbitrary conditional discriminations and testing for derived relations may be essential for understanding changes in cognitive skills. Such conditional discrimination procedures are often used within stimulus equivalence research. For example, the participant is taught AB and BC relations and tested if emergent relations as BA, CB, AC and CA occur. The purpose of the current explorative experiment was to study stimulus equivalence class formation in older adults with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings as an additional measure. The EEG was used to learn about whether there was an indication of cognitive changes such as those observed in neurocognitive disorders (NCD). The present study included four participants who did conditional discrimination training and testing. The experimental design employed pre-class formation sorting and post-class formation sorting of the stimuli used in the experiment. EEG recordings were conducted before training, after training and after testing. The results showed that two participants formed equivalence classes, one participant failed in one of the three test relations, and one participant failed in two of the three test relations. This fourth participant also failed to sort the stimuli in accordance with the experimenter-defined stimulus equivalence classes during post-class formation sorting. The EEG indicated no cognitive decline in the first three participants but possible mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in the fourth participant. The results suggest that equivalence class formation may provide information about cognitive impairments such as those that are likely to occur in the early stages of NCD. The study recommends replications with broader samples.

Why We Are Still Not Acting to Save the World: the Upward Challenge of a Post-Skinnerian Behavior Science

“…This research showed that stimuli sharing common members could spontaneously merge to form even larger classes (Saunders, Saunders, Kirby, & Spradlin, 1988). Other research explored relationships between derived stimulus classes and private events (Arntzen & Steingrimsdottir, 2017;DeGrandpre, Bickel, & Higgins, 1992;Dougher et al, 1994;Haimson, Wilkinson, Rosenquist, Ouimet, & McIlvane, 2009;Schlund, Cataldo, & 5 With this expansion came a change in vocabulary. Sidman (e.g., 1994) had referred to such phenomena as symmetry (when two stimuli can be identified as "going together" regardless of which is presented) and equivalence (as described above).…”

Equivalence Projective Simulation as a Framework for Modeling Formation of Stimulus Equivalence Classes

“…However, the equivalence theory can be used in teaching new concepts to normal children and adults, including college students (Sidman et al, 1986;Hove, 2003;Saunders et al, 2005;Fienup et al, 2010;Walker et al, 2010;Lovett et al, 2011;Grisante et al, 2013;Placeres, 2014;Fienup et al, 2015). Some neurocognitive disorders, like Alzheimer's disease, are also a research area that equivalence theory deals with where it is discussed that derived relational responding is deteriorated as the cognitive impairment advances over time (Bódi et al, 2009;Gallagher & Keenan, 2009;Steingrimsdottir & Arntzen, 2011;Sidman, 2013;Arntzen et al, 2013;Arntzen & Steingrimsdottir, 2014;Seefeldt, 2015;Ducatti & Schmidt, 2016;Arntzen & Steingrimsdottir, 2017;Brogård-Antonsen & Arntzen, 2019).…”

Correlations between the performance of older adults in conditional discrimination training and in a screening test for Alzheimer’s Disease

“…Arntzen and Steingrimsdottir (2017) also found evidence that cognitive decline -measured based on electroencephalographic activity -was related to the non-emergence of symmetrical relations (Arntzen & Steingrimsdottir, 2017). In an exploratory study, four older adults learned AC and BC baseline relations and were tested for the emergence of symmetrical (CA and BC) and equivalence relations (AC and CA).…”

“…Some studies have investigated the relationship between the performance of older adults in the emergence of equivalence classes and other procedures for cognitive decline screening (Arntzen & Steingrimsdottir, 2017;Gallagher & Keenan, 2009). Gallagher and Keenan (2009) investigated the relationship between the scores on the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE; Folstein et al, 1975) -a screening test for cognitive impairment in which lower scores are related to lower cognitive abilities -and the performances of older adults on a task involving the formation of two 3-member equivalence classes.…”