ABSTRACT
The principles of associationism were becoming resurrected by the Empiricists/Associationists of the17th and 18th centuries such as John Locke and David Hume. The traditional associationists envisaged associations between sensory “qualities”, which further converged into features of objects, and then objects themselves, and, finally, “ideas” of increasing complexity. Accretions and organisations of knowledge have, of course, long been seen as central to cognitive development in the associationist view. So the basic description of such changes, and how they affect cognition, has long been a major aim of research. A distinction made in much of associationist memory research is between nouns for concrete concepts such as “table” and “chair”, and nouns for abstract concepts such as “truth” and “wisdom”. Associationist principles have been popular in advice about memory and remembering, which seem equally applicable to children and adults. Associationism arose as an answer to the nativist/rationalist insistence that knowledge and cognition are too rich to arise from degenerate, unreliable experience.
