Glossary A

Glossary A

Association areas refer to the areas of the cerebral cortex that house memories and are involved in thought, perception, learning, and language.

Association or polymodal areas refer to brain regions involved in the integration of sensory information from different sensory cortices and linking the sensory cortices to the motor cortices. These associative cortices support complex mental and behavioral functions.

Association reflex refers to Bechterev's term for what Pavlov called a Conditioned reflex.

- Association Study : Association Study refers to a Research strategy for comparing genetic markers in groups of people with and without a particular disorder.

Associationism refers to a philosophical doctrine maintaining that complex ideas are the sum of smaller, more elemental ideas joined together. It examines how events or ideas can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning. Moreover, Associationism is the philosophical belief that mental phenomena, such as learning, remembering, and imagining, can be explained in terms of the Laws of Association.

(Loosening of) Associations refers to illogical and disturbed thought processes; one of the "four A’s” used to identify the splitting of external reality found in schizophrenia. Loosening of Associations also means disordered patterns of though, inferring a cognitive deficit. (see Eugen Bleuler) The other "A's" are: Ambivalence, Autism and Affect.

Associative Agnosia refers to a form of Visual Agnosia in which perceptual Processing is fairly normal, but there is an impairment in the ability to derive the meaning of objects. (See Visual agnosia).

The Associative chain theory refers to a theory favored by behaviorists that explains the formulation of a sentence as a chain of associations between the individual words in the sentence.