Preliminary study on the role of conditional differential outcomes in the chimpanzee's conditional discrimination

Abstract

One chimpanzee, who had a long training history of conditional discrimanation tasks, was trained on a new conditional-discrimination procedure in which a visual stimulus (conditional differential outcome) corresponding to each stimulus class followed the responses to the comparison stimulus. She was also trained on identity matching with new "Kanji" stimuli with conditional differential outcome. After the baseline training, she was tested in trained sample-Kanji comparison or Kanji sample-trained comparison trials. The subject reliably selected the corresponding comparison stimuli on particular probe trials. This result might suggest that the differentiation of outcomes among stimulus classes had some effect on the establishment of stimulus class membership.