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The Theory Of The 's Theory

Decent Essays

Associationists are believers that a person is born as a tabula rasa or a blank slate where everything that has been learnt has been imprinted upon through connections made in the environment. This is why lemons are associated with being sour or a cloudy day is thought to signify rain. Stemming back centuries, many renown thinkers of their time have contributed to the theory.
The ideology can be first traced back to Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who among many other things held a specific interest in memory. His view is thought to be the beginning of what will come to be known as associationism, explained as the formation of memory depended on bridging similar events, sensations or ideas together. By associating them, when one-half of the association is recalled it rouses a memory or causes a person to be apprehensive of the other half. Aristotle believed that there were three main principles when it came to association. First was contiguity where the nearness in space (spatial contiguity) and time (temporal contiguity) causes the events to become associated with each other. Another principle is frequency, the more often the experienced events are contiguous the stronger they are imprinted into the mind as being connected. The final principle is similarity where if two things are similar then one thought or sensation will naturally come to spark the thought of the other. John Locke was another philosopher who came to dwell upon Aristotle’s theory of associations. He

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