Notes for Lecture 3: Associationistic Theory

1. Association theory as a principle of mind— Mind is simply the concatenation of elements. The elements are associated according to some automatic mechanical principles. "Associations are to mind what gravity is to objects" (Hume). It is atomistic, and mechanical. Also essentially all associationists believed that the elements that are associated are acquired through learning and experience. Thus associationists are empiricists. This has been the dominant view in British and American psychology for three centuries

2. Elements of association.

1. For Aristotle, British Empiricists (e.g. Locke, Berkeley, Hume) and the structuralists (e.g. Wundt, Titchener) the elements were primarily sensations and ideas:
2. For the behaviorists the elements were primarily stimuli and responses
3. In the study of memory by Ebbinghaus and others the elements were often words.
4. Images, feelings, stimuli, behaviors, secretions, implicit behavior, neuronal activity.

1.     Primary Laws have included contiguity, similarity, and (briefly) contrast
2.     Secondary laws include frequency, recency, vividness,
3.     Behaviorist’s theories of learning and conditioning are associationistic theories
4.     The history of an association (experiential, innate) of two elements leads one to trigger the appearance of the other

1.     Strength of an association
2.     Law of exercise
3.     Law of effect (reinforcement theory)
4.     Habit family hierarchy
5.     implicit associative elements

1. Puzzle box (Skinner Box)
2. Mazes
3. Reversal and nonreversal transfer (Kendler (p. 88))

a. Examples
i. verba, luppi, bagler, thrize
ii. prega, rogena, pleap, viole,
iii. broin, arancy, chifn, relbawr

b. Variables that affect solution time.
i. Familiarity of goal word
ii. Transition probability of letter sequences in target
iii. Number of moves required to reach target
iv. Transition probability of presented letter string
v. Context within which anagram is presented

c. An explanation from association theory
i. The anagram has responses associated with it
ii. Habit family hierarchy--Same stimulus is associated with different responses at different strengths
iii. Strength of responses determine its likelihood of expression
iv. A response that is not reinforced is weakened
v. Strong habits are harder to override than weaker ones
vi. Higher frequency patterns have stronger responses associated with them

1. Transfer of training
2. Mediation theory--sequences of elements, many of them hidden
3. Connectionist theories--currently some of the most popular theories in psychology
4. Neural localization of function

Task analysis
        Structure: Words, syllables, consonant clusters, frequency, target areas

        Strategies.

1. Count vowels and consonants,
2. Try for high frequency groupings in the right place in a word
3. Search for words with same letters as presented string
4. Search within a category

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