ABSTRACT
From Aristotle's early musings on the mind to computational models of neural networks, the concept of association—or the hypothetical link between mental representations—has reigned supreme in understandings of memory. Of particular relevance to this essay is the role of associations in episodic memory, or the ability to conspaniously recollect the events or episodes of one's past (Tulving, 1972 1983). This form of memory evolved to provide us with a link between present thoughts or environmental cues and relevant information from our past, and this linking power often is attributed to mental associations. The classic view of association, as advocated centuries ago by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and James Mill, was based on the intuition that one idea or memory tends to meaningfully lead to another during the course of thought. A common assumption was that the mind forms associations between contiguous events (those close in time or space) and between similar events (those with similar meanings or sensory attributes). At a later point in time, thinking of one event could activate the other via the associative link that was stored in memory.
