Abstract
Stimulus equivalence paradigm has been used to investigate symbolic behavior over the last 50 years. Still, little attention has been directed in the study of equivalence classes maintenance. This bibliographic review, based on the PRISMA Protocol, provides an overview of the effects of different variables on the stability of equivalence classes over time. Searches were conducted on four databases (PsychINFO, Elsevier Scopus, Web of Science, and SciELO) and returned 95 results. Excluding the duplicated papers and applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria resulted in 14 papers. The references of each paper were examined for papers about maintenance of equivalence relations that were not found in the database search and 10 more articles were included. Therefore, 24 papers were selected in this bibliographic review. The papers were categorized considering the variable investigated, that is: class size, training and testing parameters, nature of stimuli, generalized relations, and equivalence based instruction. Future studies should focus on the study of variables that affect the maintenance of equivalence classes, considering the small number of papers in this field and the importance of this knowledge in both experimental and applied settings.