Universidade Federal do Pará

If stimulus equivalence is a model of meaning, abstract stimuli should acquire the meaning of meaningful stimuli equivalent to them. In Ex-periment 1, college students matched faces expressing emotions to arbitrary pictures, forming three classes of equivalent stimuli, each comprising an emotional expression and three arbitrary pictures. Se-mantic differential judgments by students who formed equivalence classes were similar to evaluations of the faces, and this similarity increased when delayed matching was used in training. Experiment 2 found that pictures distant 1-node from the faces were judged as simi-stimuli acquired functions of meaningful stimuli equivalent to them, but this depended on experimental parameters such as delayed match-ing and nodal distance