The Collaborative International Dictionary
Associationism \As*so`ci*a"tion*ism\, n. (Philos.) The doctrine or theory held by associationists.
Wiktionary
n. (context psychology English) A theory that association (of experiences etc) is the basis of consciousness and mental activity
WordNet
n. (psychology) a theory that association is the basic principle of mental activity [syn: association theory]
Wikipedia
Associationism is the idea that mental processes operate by the association of one mental state with its successor states.
Usage examples of "associationism".
The title not only confirmed the centrality of the hippocampus to studies of animal learning, but was also symbolic of the conceptual shift amongst psychologists away from the crudities of behaviourism and simple associationism towards an understanding of animals, like humans, as cognitive organisms.
This alternative tradition, together with the ideas of genetic epistemology developed over the same period by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, became a serious competitor to associationism, especially in western Europe.
What is more, association-ism, initially a psychological theory, became a neurobiological one as well in the hands of the Montreal psychologist Donald Hebb, whose book The Organization of Behaviour, published in 1949, explicitly offered a cellular, neural version of associationism.