[2] It finds its place in modern psychology in such areas as memory, learning, and the study of neural pathways.
[3] Associative learning is when a subject creates a relationship between stimuli (e.g. auditory or visual) or behavior and the original stimulus.
The higher the concreteness of stimulus items, the more likely are they to evoke sensory images that can function as mediators of associative learning and memory.
[4] The ability to learn new information is essential to daily life and thus a critical component of healthy aging.
There is substantial research documenting aging-related decline in forming and retrieving episodic memories.
[8] The strength of the response to the conditioned stimulus increases over the period of learning, as the CS becomes associated with UCS.
Stimuli do not cause behavior, as in classical conditioning, but instead the associations are created between stimulus and consequence, as an extension by Thorndike on his Law of Effect.
His studies included the aspect of contingency, which refers to the connection between a specific action and the following consequence or reinforcement.
[8] The overall content of moods, compared to emotions, feelings or affects, are less specific and are likely to be provoked by a stimulus or event.
During this paradigm, it is learned to create compositions from different categories, and for this reason, some researchers agree that acquired equivalence can be a synonym to categorization.
An example of acquired equivalence is from the studies Geoffrey Hall and his colleagues have conducted with pigeons.
This result shows that the pigeons have learned the equivalence of two colors from their co-occurring and their having similar consequence in one occurrence.
[15] Understanding the relationships between different items is fundamental to episodic memory, and damage to the hippocampal region of the brain has been found to hinder learning of associations between objects.
If the participant's mean reaction time is negative, then that individual is thought to have less implicit bias.
If the participant's mean reaction time is positive, then that individual is thought to have more implicit bias.