Navarro Victor M, Wasserman Edward A
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA.
J Exp Anal Behav. 2025 Jul;124(1):e70020. doi: 10.1002/jeab.70020. Epub 2025 May 6.
A recent survey of the evidence on associative symmetry in humans revealed that nearly all the demonstrations either unintentionally trained backward stimulus pairings and/or had a temporal overlap between the stimuli being trained. We consider these criticisms and improve on our own method of "associative networks." In this method, participants learn multiple stimulus pairings via arbitrary matching-to-sample tasks in which the stimuli are concurrently presented as sample and comparison stimuli. In Experiment 1, human participants learned a bidirectional network (in which symmetry was synergistic) and a unidirectional network (in which symmetry was antagonistic) or two unidirectional networks (removing explicit reinforcement of backward stimulus pairings). In Experiment 2, participants learned two unidirectional networks; however, we removed the temporal overlap between sample and comparison stimuli by imposing a 1-s delay between them. Both experiments showed robust evidence of symmetry, suggesting that the expression of symmetry in humans survives the most common confounds in published research.
最近一项关于人类联想对称性证据的调查显示，几乎所有的演示要么无意中训练了反向刺激配对，和/或在被训练的刺激之间存在时间重叠。我们考虑了这些批评意见，并改进了我们自己的“联想网络”方法。在这种方法中，参与者通过任意匹配样本任务学习多个刺激配对，其中刺激同时作为样本和比较刺激呈现。在实验1中，人类参与者学习了一个双向网络（其中对称性是协同的）和一个单向网络（其中对称性是对抗的）或两个单向网络（消除对反向刺激配对的明确强化）。在实验2中，参与者学习了两个单向网络；然而，我们通过在样本和比较刺激之间施加1秒的延迟来消除它们之间的时间重叠。两个实验都显示出有力的对称性证据，这表明人类对称性的表现经受住了已发表研究中最常见的混淆因素。
