Making the Connections Between Elements Participating in Cognitive Associations

Relations between stimuli (contingencies, dependencies, etc.) provide valuable information about regularities and uncertainties in the environment. Statistical and associative mechanisms thought to be responsible for learning such information are commonly assumed to be passive and automatic. The feasibility of such learning mechanisms is questionable, however, because the magnitude of the possible associative links exceeds the neurological potential for stimulus relation encoding. Constraints are needed to limit learning processes to profitable stimulus information. The current research explores two such constraints. The first one yields successful learning of a relation between stimuli only when they are actively co-processed in a manner that adjoins them, for example, by means of a comparison. Secondly, relations between stimuli are better learned when they or (some of) their features are relevant to completing a goal directed task. These constraints provide and powerful and effective means to demarcate target information for learning processes.