Lyddy, Barnes-Holmes, & Hampson, 2001

The researchers, at Wales institute and the National University of Ireland, pretrained a connectionist network on a series of equivalence and sequence tasks to simulate the preexperimental experience of an adult subject. It was then exposed to the equivalent of 6 conditional discriminations, and was tested for the formation of 3 3-member equivalence classes (corresponding to A1-A2-A3, B1-B2-B3, C1-C2-C3). The data suggest that connectionist networks may provide accurate and plausible models of stimulus equivalence and transfer of function phenomena in natural language.