ABSTRACT
The relationship between stimuli and the behaviors that follow them is the topic of this chapter, a topic called stimulus control. As we have seen throughout this book, predicting what response will occur in the presence of a given stimulus is a challenging task, even when the same stimulus is presented again and again in a controlled laboratory environment. But in the real world, all creatures are repeatedly confronted with stimuli and events they have never experienced before, and their survival may depend on an adaptive response. The topic of stimulus control includes research on how creatures respond to such novel stimuli. In previous chapters we used the term generalization to
describe the transfer of responding from trained to untrained stimuli. In this chapter, we will examine the process of generalization more closely. We will also explore the topic of concept learning, which involves the classification of different objects into a single category (e.g., “trees”), even though their visual appearances may sometimes have little in common.
