'mental association' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe when two people associate or connect something with each other mentally. For example, "The language I was learning reminded me of another language I had learned in the past, and I made a mental association between the two."
If you treat your bed like your work desk or Grand Central Station soon enough your brain will start associating it with a plethora of activities, which can weaken "the mental association between your bedroom and sleep," according to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Then any pre-election warnings or rumors will trigger the mental association with danger.
"Confusion occurs when consumers make an incorrect mental association between the involved commercial" service providers.
"When they're open you have a mental association with what you perceive the scent to be," she said.
Building a mental association between a physical place and studying will make it easier to slip into a state of focus.
Obviously for any such effect to occur, you would have to have some mental association between the Speedo jacket and swimming speed.
It is utilized by creating mental associations between items to be remembered and items that are already associated with numbers (the latter is a relatively simple task, as the item-number pairs often rhyme).
Her art splices mental associations with an acute sense of materiality, scale and tactility.
Switzerland: The place comes with an easy set of mental associations.
And here is why these kinds of strong mental associations matter for the perpetuation of inequities.
Like Funes, S. had a sort of private language to catalogue the richness of his mental associations.
