About the Scope of This Text This book contains two types of material ~ first, the many divergent and often diffuse meanings given to the concepts of association, associative memory, and associative recaZZ are expounded. A review of this kind was felt necessary because there apparently does not exist any single monograph which could serve as a reference to these topics. But the presentation of the main body of this text is motivated by quite other reasons: in recent years, plenty of interesting mathematical and system-theoretical material has been published which makes it possible to gain a view of associative memory which is different from the conventional abstract and computationally oriented approaches. It seems that the basic operation of associative memory, the storage of information together with the relations or links between the data items, and the selective recall of stored information relative to a piece of key or cue information presented, is not restricted to certain computer-technological implementations but can also be reflected in more general mathematically describable processes in certain physical or other systems, especially in their adaptive state changes. It further seems that some generally known forms of associative memory, namely, certain computer technological artifacts, or abstract systems of concepts or data, are in fact special representations of a class of processes characterized as associative memory.
