Emergence of Relations and the Essence of Learning: A Review of Sidman's Equivalence Relations and Behavior: A Research Story
Sidman addresses two very important questions in Equivalence Relations and Behavior: A Research Story: What are the bases of behavioral competence? And how do units of learning become related? The book recounts the story of how an understanding of emergent relations and competencies was achieved through studies in his teaching-research program with mentally retarded subjects. Although children normally accrue vast networks of relations between stimuli and events, those with mental retardation typically do not. Consequently, by learning how to establish those networks, Sidman and his students contribute richly both to the cultivation of competencies by their subjects and, more generally, to an understanding of real-world human behavior. The basic equivalence paradigm affords the subject feedback and reinforcement for very specific choices during training, but the test is not for those choices! Rather, tests for equivalence look for new choices, ones seemingly quite foreign to the training regimen. The tests for equivalence relations entail presentations of stimuli that were the options for conditional choice during reinforced training. In tests of equivalence, correct choices are novel; hence, they have never been reinforced during training. The study of equivalence relations can encourage the emergence of new perspectives that are more symbiotic than competitive. In full acknowledgment of the important role and contributions made by those who identify themselves as experimental analysts of behavior, it is timely that rapprochements be worked toward, as indeed they are, to meld that perspective with others of our time. Both our research methods and our expectations about the nature of the learning process and the abilities of our subjects can delimit what they might learn and what we, in turn, learn about their learning. The text will be of great value for instruction at the upper-division and graduate levels. Its impact will be substantial, for it defines an important advance in our efforts to understand the richness of behavior in both humans and nonhuman animals. Although not presented to that end, the book might also serve to bridge communications with other groups of animal researchers whose interests lie more in a comparative or ethological framework.