Advertisers quickly cancel contracts with famous athletes following a scandal because the athlete is no longer associated with positive feelings. Consequently, the athlete can no longer serve as an unconditioned stimulus to condition the public to associate positive feelings (the unconditioned response) with the advertiser's product (the conditioned stimulus).

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Associative memory is the unconscious retrieval and storage of information through association with other information. Associative memory can be acquired through two different learning processes: 

- Classical conditioning
- Operant conditioning

Associative memory

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020, April 22). Psychology (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

OpenStax Psychology (2nd ed.) Textbook

Operant conditioning is a form of associative learning in which the motivation for a behavior occurs after the behavior is demonstrated. An organism learns to associate a voluntary action with its subsequent consequence, which can be either a reinforcer or a punisher. This consequence then modifies the likelihood of the behavior being repeated in the future.

Operant Conditioning

Classical conditioning is a type of associative learning in which organisms learn to connect events that repeatedly happen together. Through this process, a reflexive response originally elicited by one stimulus can be mapped to a different stimulus by training an association between the two.

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