In stimulus control studies with non-humans, incoherence between the planned control relations and the actual stimulus control established in training is frequently found. For that reason, the Experimental School of Primates develops different teaching procedures, aiming to make easy the establishment of conditional relations in capuchin monkeys. The present work consists of one collection that comprises three research reports formatted as papers. Chapter 1 describes a study, comprising two experiments, evaluating the stimulus shaping procedure to establish arbitrary conditional relations. In Experiment I, two monkeys, M12 and M15, quickly acquired the discriminations, and a third subject (M09) required long train. In Experiment II, the procedure was modified and a new train was carried out with subject M09, resulting in a better performance. Stimulus control digression was however found, making difficult concluding the stimulus shaping process. Two capuchin monkeys participated in the study presented in Chapter 2, with the purpose of evaluating, through the blank comparison procedure, the stimulus control relations (selection of S+, rejection of S- or both – mix control) during identity matching training. Subject M09 firstly presented reject control, for one of the identity relations and mix control for the others tested relations. Subject M16 presented mix control for all tested relations with the blank comparison. Still on stimulus control, Chapter 3 presents a study to verify if the use of specific reinforcer stimuli in identity conditional relations is enough to make such reinforcement stimuli function as nodal in equivalence class formation with capuchins monkeys. The study demonstrated that specific reinforcement was not enough for class formation. Its possible that similar proprieties between stimuli belonging to different potential classes have made difficult the training, besides the fact that the specific reinforcers used may have not been enough distinct to function as nodal.
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