For example, in the Y-maze spatial novelty preference task exploration of the arms may lead to the formation of associations between cues such that associative retrieval may result in long-term habituation.
The present study demonstrates the contribution of spatial contiguity in the formation of associations between two neutral stimuli.
So, although conditioning may involve the formation of associations between events or the attribution of particular events to their most probable antecedent causes, it must also include some mechanisms for translating these associations into changes in behaviour.
It was suggested that such conditions as temporal and spatial contiguity, repetition, similarity, and vividness favoured the formation of associations, and each was called a law of association.
Generally, the idea is that by virtue of the formation of associations or acquired propositional knowledge about the relation between neutral movements and pain, these movements may signal pain, and hence start to elicit defensive fear responses (eg, avoidance behavior).
These results clearly defined the task of comparative psychology: to demonstrate that the function of association cortex consisted in the formation of associations.
The DG encodings in the hippocampus propagate to the CA3 region that is believed to be heavily composed of recurrent connections supporting the formation of associations.
We suggest that the sounds included in the nonwords can also elicit similar sensorimotor experiences specific to size and that these associations can promote the formation of associations in memory.
(See, for comparison, Dennett's method of heterophenomenology; Dennett 1991, pp. 72 81) The task of psychological behaviorism is to specify types of association, understand how environmental events control behavior, discover and elucidate causal regularities or laws or functional relations which govern the formation of associations, and predict how behavior will change as the environment changes.
