Glaze[1] developed the concept of association value to explain differences in the rate of learning of nonsense syllables, which had been introduced into psychology by Hermann Ebbinghaus[2] to provide a standard stimulus in studies of human learning and memory, but had rapidly been discovered to have highly variable properties.
Building on earlier experiments by, for example, Lyon,[4] Noble showed that association value of nonsense syllables, measured in this way, was strongly linked to the speed with which people could learn to reproduce a list of them.
It is given content by the facts that: Although the idea of association value seems intuitive, further reflection shows that the underlying principle is not logically inevitable.
For example, in the Rescorla–Wagner model of classical conditioning, the parameter β, which expresses the capacity of the unconditional stimulus to support learning, is sometimes referred to as its association value.
[11] This usage is consistent with the more general concept of association value as described by Glaze, but typically in such formal theories the parameters are not measured independently of the fitting of the model to learning data.