mental association
Linked ideas naturally
Mental association is the cognitive link between ideas, memories, or concepts that causes one to trigger another.
Seeing a photograph might evoke a forgotten emotion; a particular song might summon a specific person.
The principle underlies much of how memory works—and how advertisers work on memory: The brand built mental associations between their product and feelings of nostalgia.
- PavlovConditioning reflex discoverer
- primingMaking ready beforehand
- recallMemory retrieval act
- mnemonicsTechniques to assist recall
- memoryMind's retention capacity
memory palace · hint · conditioning · knee-jerk reaction · schemas · train of thought · word pair · recognition · synapse · analogies · neural network · heuristics · cognitive bias · categorization · biases · attention · Rorschach test · couch
mental associationlogical deduction
Deriving conclusions from premises
deductive reasoning · critical analysis · logical reasoning · formal reasoning · formal logic
mental associationreflective thought
Purposeful mental self-examination