ABSTRACT
Wolfgang Kohler's transposition experiments always involved two pairs of stimuli only, the training pair and then the following transposition pair. In particular Kohler's work on transposition interested the stimulus-response (S-R) learning theorists. A good test of the relative hypothesis would be to extend Kohler's 'one-step' experiments by testing whether animals and young children also transpose relative responses to pairs which are several steps along the continuum. Relations are not specific in that they can be applied to an infinite number of stimuli along the continuum, and so from the S-R point of view relative codes are complex and sophisticated, and therefore unlikely to be found either in animals or in young children. Spence demonstrated that chimpanzees make less and less relative choices in a size transposition test the greater the difference between training and test pairs, and the distance effect was also observed in rats, both in size and in brightness transposition experiments.
