Dickins, D. W. (2005).
On aims and methods in the neuroimaging of derived relations.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 84, 453-
483.
Ingenious and seemingly powerful technologies have been developed recently that
enable the visualization in some detail of events in the brain concomitant upon
the ongoing behavioral performance of a human participant. Measurement of such
brain events offers at the very least a new set of dependent variables in
relation to which the independent variables familiarly manipulated in the
operant laboratory may be explored. Two related paradigms in which a start has
been made in such research concern the derivation of novel or emergent relations
from a baseline set of trained relations, and include the phenomenon of
transitive inference (TI), observed in studies of stimulus equivalence (SE) and
serial learning (SL) or seriation. This paper reviews some published and
forthcoming neuroimaging studies of these and related phenomena, and considers
how this line of research both demands and represents a welcome synthesis
between types of question and levels of explanation in behavioral science that
often have been seen as antithetical.
Key words: stimulus equivalence, transitive inference, functional magnetic
resonance imaging, derived relations, matching to sample, serial learning, brain
regions