Dickins D. W. (2005). On aims and methods in the neuroimaging of derived relations. Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 84(3), 453–483. doi:10.1901/jeab.2005.92-04
[Abstract]Ingenious and seemingly powerful technologies have been developed recently that enable the visualization in some detail of events in the brain concomitant upon the ongoing behavioral performance of a human participant. Measurement of such brain events offers at the very least a new set of dependent variables in relation to which the independent variables familiarly manipulated in the operant laboratory may be explored. Two related paradigms in which a start has been made in such research concern the derivation of novel or emergent relations from a baseline set of trained relations, and include the phenomenon of transitive inference (TI), observed in studies of stimulus equivalence (SE) and serial learning (SL) or seriation. This paper reviews some published and forthcoming neuroimaging studies of these and related phenomena, and considers how this line of research both demands and represents a welcome synthesis between types of question and levels of explanation in behavioral science that often have been seen as antithetical.
[Citing Place (1995/6)]  
Citing Place (1995/6) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section DERIVED RELATIONS
* SE [...] does seem to map on to words and their referents (T. E. Dickins & Dickins, 2001; Place, 1995) in the sense, for example, that a set of symbols—such as the word dog spoken and heard, written and read, and corresponding words in other languages—are in equivalence relations with each other, and in addition they become attached to a variety of signs for dogs, that is to say stimuli associated with dogs, such as the sight, sounds, and smells of dogs. The symbols and signs all together constitute an equivalence class. Note that the relation between the symbols and the canine signs is arbitrary, as is true for most words and their referents. Children having learned to say dog in the presence of a dog will spontaneously be able to point to a picture of a dog when they hear dog spoken (involving symmetry). If they also learn to read the written word dog (i.e., when they see this combination of letters they respond with the spoken word dog), then they will be able in an appropriate future context to indicate directly a dog or a picture of a dog on seeing the written word (transitivity).
Section THEORETICAL ACCOUNTS OF SL AND SE
* But the fact that names may play a part in or even be sufficient for the formation of SE relations between the stimuli they name does not mean they are invariably necessary. The naming hypothesis is the mirror image of the idea that the very capacity for SE may be a necessary phylogenetic precursor (or preadaptation or exaption) of the (distinctively human) capacity to symbolize in the first place (T. E. Dickins & Dickins, 2001, 2002; Place, 1995). As O’Donnell and Saunders (2003) point out, the increasing number of publications demonstrating SE in mentally retarded individuals who have failed to develop language provides falsifying evidence against Horne and Lowe’s (1996, 1997) idea that language is a prerequisite for SE. Taking a more central view of semantic processes (rather than a peripheralized account in terms of naming behavior), the resemblance between SE structures seemingly indicated by nodal effects, and cognitivist entities, specifically the semantic associative network of Collins and Loftus (1975), has been noted by Fields, Reeve, Adams, and Verhave (1991). This may reflect similarities in the way the trained relations are learned in the first place. The greater facility with which meaningful stimuli are learned and integrated into equivalence classes compared with more ‘‘abstract’’ stimuli (Bentall et al., 1993) also suggests this.