Chris Ninness, Mark Dixon, Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Ruth Anne Rehfeldt, Robin Rumph, Glen McCuller, James Holland, Ronald Smith, Sharon K. Ninness, & Jennifer McGinty. (2009). Constructing and deriving reciprocal trigonometric relations: A functional analytic approach. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 42, 191-208.

Participants were pretrained and tested on mutually entailed trigonometric relations and combinatorially entailed relations as they pertained to positive and negative forms of sine, cosine, secant, and cosecant. Experiment 1 focused on training and testing transformations of these mathematical functions in terms of amplitude and frequency followed by tests of novel relations. Experiment 2 addressed training in accordance with frames of coordination (same as) and frames of opposition (reciprocal of) followed by more tests of novel relations. All assessments of derived and novel formula-to-graph relations, including reciprocal functions with diversified amplitude and frequency transformations, indicated that all 4 participants demonstrated substantial improvement in their ability to identify increasingly complex trigonometric formula-to-graph relations pertaining to same as and reciprocal of to establish mathematically complex repertoires.

DESCRIPTORS: combinatorial entailment, construction-based training, mathematical relations, mutual entailment, matching to sample, trigonometry, relational frame theory