Jamie Cummins Bryan Roche Aoife Cartwright Maynooth University The Function Acquisition Speed Test: A measure of stimulus relatedness? Jamie Cummins Bryan Roche Aoife Cartwright Maynooth University

Implicit Tests Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998) Assumes shorter RTs for pairing words that are congruous to ‘mental associations’, and that RT differences are an index of mental association strength

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Conceptual & procedural issues with IAT Functional definition of this remains elusive (Hughes, Barnes-Holmes & DeHouwer, 2011) Issues with commensuration of time penalty for erroneous responses and accuracy metric Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) as a behavior-analytic alternative?

FAST: Stimulus Presentation Salt

IAT vs. FAST IAT FAST Purported to measure: Mental associations Stimulus relatedness/ acquisition of shared function Feedback: Incorrect responses only Feedback on all trials Procedure: 7 different blocks (16 or 32 trials per block); scoring on fourth and seventh block only 2 blocks – 50 trials per block (can vary across procedural types); one consistent, one inconsistent Response window: No explicit response window, responses truncated post-hoc 3s response window, then ‘incorrect’ feedback given Scoring: Rigid; reaction times and post-hoc transformation via d-score Multiple possible methods; slope of regression line fitted to fluency curve

Sample fluency:

FAST Effect: Positive score = more fluent on consistent block; Fluency consistent block – fluency inconsistent block = FAST Effect Positive score = more fluent on consistent block; negative score = more fluent on inconsistent block

Function Acquisition Speed Test Although format differs, the core processes measured by the FAST are identical to other implicit tests (e.g. IAT) (Gavin et al., 2008; Roche et al., 2005) Nature of the relationship between the paired stimuli should reveal information about learning history with stimuli this has not been experimentally verified

Little research has focused on systematic manipulation of stimulus relatedness & outcomes on implicit tests Some studies (e.g. O’Reilly et al., 2012) have shown effects using arbitrary, trained stimulus relations This study sought to explore effects of systematic stimulus relatedness manipulation on subsequent implicit test effects

Method 127 participants; after MTS fails N = 89 52 females, 37 males; mean age = 20.2 +/- 1.6 years 5 arbitrary conditions: No Training (n = 12) One Session (n = 23) Two Sessions (n = 13) 3 MTSs in 1 sitting (n = 10) 3 MTSs in 3 sittings (n = 14) 1 real word condition (n = 17) – used South Florida Free Association Norms Index

Matching-to-sample Linear training and testing phases, each with block length of 32 trials Training: A1-B1, B1-C1, A2-B2, and B2-C2 Test: A1-C1 and A2-C2 Looping for blocks that did not reach criterion (31 out of 32 correct) Feedback provided in training phase only

Real words South Florida Free Association Norms Index (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998) E.g., pepper-salt (r = .695; .701) / king- queen (r = .772; .73) stimuli

FAST: Stimulus Presentation Salt

FAST: Feedback CORRECT OR WRONG

Results All data were normally distributed One-way ANOVA found significant changes across conditions; F(5, 83) = 2.335, p=.049; partial eta squared = .123. Linear polynomial contrast; F(1, 83) = 14.414, p=.0003; ηp2 = 0.148.

Results * = p < .05 at one-tailed level N = 92

Results Two-way mixed between-within groups ANOVA run using BLOCK (i.e., consistent or inconsistent) X TRAINING (i.e., relatedness condition) Significant interaction effect between block and training, F(1, 83) = 6.12, p = .049; ηp2 = .123.

Results

Participant 59 (No training) Participant 33 (Real Words)

What do these data mean? Greater degree of stimulus relatedness leads to commensurate changes in FAST effects Consistent block increases, which inconsistent block seems to begin to decrease at high levels of relatedness Evidence for proof of principle of the FAST’s conceptual underpinnings

What do these data mean? For the real word condition, S- control was purely contextual (e.g., ‘salt’ is not NOT related to ‘queen’) Expect inconsistent to decrease further when contrast category is under explicit S- control?

Future research Examine differential effects of varying stimulus control in training to mimic possible naturalistic learning processes Use further arbitrary relations to identify potential ceiling effects & when they occur Confirm findings in context of other implicit tests, such as the IAT and IRAP

Future research Ultimately, experimental studies such as this will (and ought to) provide a bedrock for making empirically-validated inferences about what precisely implicit psychological test effects tell us.

Thank you for listening! Any questions? Jamie Cummins Aoife Cartwright Maynooth University Maynooth University Jamie.Cummins.2014@mumail.ie Aoife.Cartwright@nuim.ie Bryan Roche Maynooth University Bryan.t.Roche@nuim.ie