A stranger reminds me of my friend because something in the stranger's face or manner has been met with before in my friend; it has been contiguous with my friend, and recalls him by virtue of this contiguity. The stranger, as a whole individual, has never been contiguous with my friend, but some characteristic of the stranger has been thus contiguous. In association by similarity, it is not the whole present object that arouses recall of the similar object, but some part of the present object. This kind of association is important in thinking, since it brings together facts from different past experiences, and thus assembles data that may be applied to a new problem. If every new object or situation could only be taken as a whole, it could not remind me of anything previously met; and I should be like an inexperienced child in the presence of each new problem; but, taken part by part, the novel situation has been met with before, and can be handled in the light of past experience.
Exactly what there is in common between two similar faces or other objects cannot always be clearly made out; but the common characteristic is there, even if not consciously isolated, and acts as an effective stimulus to recall.
Association by Contiguity
This reduction of all the laws of association to one great law was no mean achievement; and the law of association by contiguity in experience holds good. If one thing recalls another to your mind, you can be sure that the two [{397}] have been contiguous in your experience, either as wholes or piecemeal. For two things to become associated, they must be experienced together.
Yes, the law holds good, when thus stated--but notice that the statement is virtually negative. It says, in effect, that two things do not become associated unless they are contiguous in experience. If it were turned about to read that two things do become associated if they are contiguous in experience, it would no longer be a true law, for the exceptions would then be extremely numerous.
The memory and testimony experiments have brought many exceptions to light. Show a person twenty pictures in a row, and let him examine each one in turn so closely that he can later recognize every one of them; and still he will not have the adjacent pictures so associated that each one can call up the next in order. To accomplish his last task, he has to observe the order specifically; it is not enough that he simply experiences pictures together. Or, again, read to a person twenty pairs of words, asking him to notice the pairs so that later he can respond by the second word of any pair when the first word is given him; and read the list through three or four times, so that he shall be able to make almost a perfect score in the expected test; still he will have formed few associations between the contiguous pairs, and will make a very low score if you ask him to recite the pairs in order. Many similar experiments have yielded the same general result--contiguity in experience and still no association.
The law of association by contiguity is unsatisfactory from a modern standpoint because it treats only of the stimulus, and says nothing about the response. It states, quite truly, that stimuli must be contiguous in order that an association between them may be formed, but it neglects to state that the association, being something in us, must [{398}] be formed by our reaction to the stimuli. It is especially necessary to consider the response because, as we have just seen, the response is not always made and the association, therefore, not always formed. Only if the stimuli are contiguous, can the associating response be aroused, but they do not infallibly arouse it even if they are contiguous.
The law of contiguity is incomplete, also, because it is not applicable to the association of two motor acts into a coördinated higher unit, or of the combination of two primary emotions into a higher emotional unit.
In a word, the time-honored law of association is no longer satisfactory because it does not fit into a stimulus-response psychology. It comes down from a time when the motor side of mental performances was largely overlooked by psychology, and when the individual was pictured as being passively "impressed" with the combinations of facts that were presented to his senses.