Young (1959, 1961) gave Group A word pairs that were created from adjacent words in the serial list. In other words, if the serial list consisted of apple, fan, hat, airplane, bunny, paper, then the pairs given in the paired associates task were apple-fan, hat-airplane, and bunny-paper.
Young gave Group B word pairs that were created from nonadjacent words in the serial list. In other words, based on the example above, the pairs were apple-airplane, hat-paper, bunny-fan.
The learning experiment you completed earlier was conducted just like Young’s study. You were either in Group A or Group B. Can you tell which group you were in?
Below is a blank graph with the axes labeled. If the behaviorists were right, that is, if stimulus-response associations were formed between the word pairs during the serial learning task, then what would the results look like? Draw a bar above Group A and Group B to indicate what the results might look like.
Originally published at http://www.sciencecases.org/behaviorism/behaviorism4.asp
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