Effects of Different Conditional Discrimination Procedures in Elderly People

The purpose of the present study was to study the effects on establishment of conditional discrimination and formation of emerged relations as a function of different matching-to-sample procedures in people over 70 years. Through a combined single-subject design and group design with reversals, both many-to-one and one-to-many training structures, and simultaneous matching-to-sample and delayed matching-to-sample (0 seconds) were alternated. Conditional discrimination was established in 32 of the 57 participants, and the results showed that the establishment was more severe in DMTS 0s than the establishment in SMTS. Further, the results showed that DMTS 0s had the highest yields of equivalence formation in the OTM structure. However, in the MTO structure, SMTS had the best outcome on the test for stimulus equivalence. Overall, there were more participants forming equivalence in the training structure MTO.