| Abstract | We examined the effects of disrupting verbal mediation in a task that models the effects of visually presented information on conceptual behavior. The experiment was done asynchronously by sending participants a SuperLab 6.0 software experiment, requesting a screen recording using Zoom, and acquiring demographic, consent, and exit interview information using Qualtrics. Sixty participants were randomly assigned to four conditions. The tact-intraverbal (TI) groups first learned to match picture stimuli with textual labels, and then to associate pairs of textual labels. The intraverbal-tact (IT) groups received the opposite sequence. After training, all groups were tested for new relationships between the visual picture stimuli. One TI group and one IT group were given an additional verbal task during the test (TI-V and IT-V respectively), which was predicted to disrupt the performance more in the IT than the TI condition, due to IT participants being more reliant on solving the task verbally. No significant differences in accuracy or reaction time were noted between groups. However, only 41% of those in the IT-V group and 13% of those in the TI-V group actually performed the additional verbal task. The experiment should be repeated through real-time video calls or in person, so that participant instruction-following can be monitored and intervened on. |
