The current study attempted to capture in real time the unfolding of the relational operant using electroencephalography (EEG) and reaction time measures. Participants were exposed to relational pretraining to establish the contextual cues of Same and
Opposite for two arbitrary stimuli. These cues were then used to establish a series of contextually controlled discriminations in order to create a simple relational
network among a series of arbitrary stimuli. During the test for derived relations of
Same and Opposite, EEG and reaction time measures were recorded for each individual
test task during the acquisition of a stable derived relational response pattern.
Participants were then exposed to an identical set of relational training and testing
tasks with the important difference that an entirely different set of stimuli was used.
EEG and reaction time measures were again recorded during the relational test
phase. Results showed that reaction times decreased for all subjects across successive
test tasks and from the first to the second stimulus set. EEG data also suggested that
there was increasingly less higher cognitive activity during the derivation of successive
stimulus relations within and across stimulus sets. Taken together these findings
provide support for the idea that derived relational responding can be viewed as an
operant activity that both develops and generalizes
