ABSTRACT
The study of stimulus control has for a long time centered around the question of the sufficient and necessary conditions responsible for the observation of a sloping gradient of generalization when some feature of the training situation is varied. In the hands of some writers, the term stimulus control has been characterized as “relatively neutral” and as one to be preferred to “traditional concepts of generalization and discrimination”. In Rudolph and Van Houten’s studies, the illumination of the key light was the stimulus that interfered with control by tones or airflows. The important feature of interdimensional training is that the stimulus correlated with nonreinforcement during initial acquisition is presumably equidistant from all test stimuli. The simplest possible account of stimulus control would be to say that the reinforcement of a particular response in the presence of a given set of stimuli will insure that all those stimuli will gain control over that response at a rate determined by their salience.
