For example, repeatedly pairing images of beautiful women in bathing suits elicits a sexual response in most men.
Advertising agencies repeatedly pair products with attractive women in television commercials with the intention of eliciting an emotional or sexually aroused response in the consumer.
Through studies on rats, it has been found that lesions to the hippocampus lead to object-place associative learning impairments.
[2] The findings of hippocampal damage that lead to impairments in the association between object-place as Gilbert & Kesner state have been seen in not only rodents but also non-human primates and humans.
[2] Previously learned associations made before the damage to the hippocampal area were not affected with impairment.
In visual associative learning, the efficiency of the participant/subject in making these connections actually will decrease as the “memory load” increases.
[4] The more items/the higher the complexity that one has to keep in their memory leads to poorer performance on paired associative learning tasks.
It is an accepted understanding that in associative learning there is a negative regression, as one ages their performance levels decrease.
It was proposed that because creating the association between word pairs requires executive resources, which has been known to be hampered in ecstasy users.
[9] However, as stated by the author, it is not possible to fully attribute these deficits in the task, but it bears noting that there are differences occurring.
In accordance with Putnam et al.,[10] the enhancement in recall in the production effect is because reading aloud creates a more distinctive memory in the encoding process.