Associative memory

Associative memory may refer to:

• Associative memory (psychology), the ability of human memory to associate items such as a person with his or her name
• Transderivational search in psychology or cybernetics, a search for a fuzzy match across a broad field
• Associative storage or content-addressable memory, a type of computer memory used in certain very high speed searching applications
• Bidirectional associative memory, a type of recurrent neural network
• Autoassociative memory, all computer memories that enable one to retrieve a piece of data from only a tiny sample of itself
• hetero-associative memory, all computer memories that enable one to retrieve a piece of data from a tiny sample of some other piece of data
• Associative Memory Base, computer memory which imitates human memory by storing connections and counts in their context
• Hopfield network, a form of recurrent artificial neural network

Associative memory

In the memory of associating two or more items, multiple cortical areas may be involved. For example, when the human memorizes the image of a person and the sound of his or her name, the cortices of two sensory modalities, i.e., visual and auditory cortices, are needed to fulfill their association. In this regard, associative memory is cross-modal memory in nature. A testable hypothesis is that these two cortical areas are connected after the associative learning of two events as well as that each of two cortices is able to encode these two input signals.

To address cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying associative memory, we need an animal model in that one signal induces the recall of its associative signal, or turned around after associative learning. A current report indicates that co-activation of the barrel and piriform cortices leads to whisker-induced olfactory responses and odorant-induced whisker motion. The neurons in these two cortical areas are able to encode whisker and odor signals with different patterns. Moreover, these two cortical areas are connected after associative learning. Therefore, a co-activation of two cortical areas leads to cross-modal memory for in information storage and distinguishable retrieval.