Laws of association

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Laws of association in Aristotle's psychology. Impressions are stored in the seat of perception, linked by the laws of similarity, contrast, and contiguity. Aristotle Senses Perception Memory Dreams Action.svg
Laws of association in Aristotle's psychology. Impressions are stored in the seat of perception, linked by the laws of similarity, contrast, and contiguity.

In psychology, the principal laws of association are contiguity, repetition, attention, pleasure-pain, and similarity. The basic laws were formulated by Aristotle in approximately 300 B.C. and by John Locke in the seventeenth century. Both philosophers taught that the mind at birth is a blank slate and that all knowledge has to be acquired by learning. The laws they taught still make up the backbone of modern learning theory. [1] [2]

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In cognitive science, association by contiguity is the principle that ideas, memories, and experiences are linked when one is frequently experienced with the other. For example, if you constantly see a knife and a fork together they become linked (associated). The more these two items (stimuli) are perceived together the stronger the link between them. When one of the memories becomes activated later on, the linked memory becomes temporarily more activated and thus easier to be called into working memory. This process is called priming, and the initial memory that primed the other is called the retrieval cue.

Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a short space of words, with no particular placement of the words to secure emphasis. It is a multilinguistic written or spoken device, frequently used in English and several other languages, such as Indian and Chinese, and so rarely termed a figure of speech.

David Hartley taught that contiguity is the main law of association, and, believing that it is the primary source, Hartley ignored David Hume's law of resemblance (Warren, 1921). [1]

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References

  1. 1 2 Laws of Association - Dictionary of Cognitive Science - Dr. Michael R.W. Dawson and Dr. David A. Medler. Retrieved 8 March 2012.
  2. Sorabji, R. (2006). Aristotle on Memory (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 54. And this is exactly why we hunt for the successor, starting in our thoughts from the present or from something else, and from something similar, or opposite, or neighboring. By this means recollection occurs...