A Behavior Analytically Modified Implicit Association Test for Measuring Sexual Categorization of Children

How to Build and How not to Build an Implicit Measure in Behavior Analysis: A case Study Using the Function Acquisition Speed Test

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the development of a behavior-analytic alternative to the popular implicit association test (IAT), namely, the function acquisition speed test (FAST). The IAT appears, prima facia, to indirectly assess participants' learning histories with regard to the categorization of stimuli. However, its origin within cognitive psychology has rendered it replete with mentalism, conceptual ambiguity, statistical arbitrariness, and confounding procedural artifacts. The most popular behavioral alternative to the IAT, the widely used implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP), has inherited many of these concerning artifacts. In this article, we present a behavior-analytic critique of both the IAT and IRAP, and argue that a behavior-analytic approach to implicit measures must have stimulus control front and center in its analysis. We then outline a series of early research studies that provided the basis for a potentially superior procedure within our field. We go on to outline how this early research was harnessed in stepwise research, guided by a strict adherence to traditional behavior-analytic methods for the analysis of stimulus relations, to increasingly modify a test format fit for the behavior analyst interested in assessing stimulus relatedness.

The relationship between differential stimulus relatedness and implicit measure effect sizes

Implicit measures have been hypothesized to allow researchers to ascertain the existence and strength of relations between stimuli, often in the context of research on attitudes. However, little controlled behavioral research has focused on whether stimulus relations, and the degree of relatedness within such relations, are indexed by implicit measures. The current study examined this issue using a behavior-analytic implicit-style stimulus relation indexing procedure known as the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST). Using a matching-to-sample (MTS) procedure to train stimulus equivalence relations between nonsense syllables, the number of iterations of the procedure was varied across groups of participants, hence controlling stimulus relatedness in the resulting equivalence relations. Following final exposure to the MTS procedure, participants completed a FAST. Another group of participants was exposed to a FAST procedure with word pairs of known relatedness. Results showed that increasing relatedness resulted in a linear increase in FAST effect size. These results provide the first direct empirical support for a key process-level assumption of the implicit literature, and offer a behavior-analytic paradigm within which to understand these effects. These results also suggest that the FAST may be a viable procedure for the quantification of emergent stimulus relations in stimulus equivalence training.