The scientific study of associative learning began nearly 100 years ago with the pioneering studies of Thorndike and Pavlov, and it continues today as an active area of research and theory. Associative learning should be the foundation for our understanding of other forms of behavior and cognition in human and nonhuman animals. The laws of associative learning are complex, and many modern theor...

Associative learning of temporally disparate events is of fundamental importance for perceptual and cognitive functions. Previous studies of the neural mechanisms of such association have been mainly focused on individual neurons or synapses, often with an assumption that there is persistent neural firing activity that decays slowly. However, experimental evidence supporting such firing activit...

We present a learning and memory architecture that allows a robot companion to incrementally learn and associate data from different sensors and actuators. We use a topology learning algorithm that clusters the received inputs into discrete categories. On top of these clusters we apply associative learning methods to store co-occurrence relationships in an associative network. We evaluated the ...

Some published reports have emphasized the similarities between Internet and laboratory research on associative learning processes. However, few of them, if any, studied systematic divergences between both types of research methodologies. In the present experiment, we investigated these divergences using an experimental preparation for the study of associative learning. The results show that di...

Are associative memories forgotten more quickly than item memories, and does the level of original learning differentially influence forgetting rates? In this study, we addressed these questions by having participants learn single words and word pairs once (Experiment 1), three times (Experiment 2), and six times (Experiment 3) in a massed learning (ML) or a distributed learning (DL) mode. Then...

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans can adapt to both the AWC-sensed odorants benzaldehyde (Bnz) and isoamyl alcohol (IsoA) and can reciprocally cross-adapt. Yet we reveal that these four adaptation scenarios actually represent two distinct forms of learning: nonassociative habituation and associative learning by pairing with a starvation unconditioned stimulus. Training to the single odorant I...

One of the most perspective ideas of further development of Reinforcement Learning (RL) research involves using associative learning models to improve performance of reinforcement learning agents. Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) have proved to be one of the most successful classes of RL methods that have been applied to maze environments. However, so far LCS have shown their effectiveness for...

Associative learning plays a variety of roles in the study of animal cognition from a core theoretical component to a null hypothesis against which the contribution of cognitive processes is assessed. Two developments in contemporary associative learning have enhanced its relevance to animal cognition. The first concerns the role of associatively activated representations, whereas the second is...

The vast majority of published work in the field of associative learning seeks to test the adequacy of various theoretical accounts of the learning process using average data. Of course, averaging hides important information, but individual departures from the average are usually designated "error" and largely ignored. However, from the perspective of an individual differences approach, this er...