Has the scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies ever taken you back to afternoons at your grandmother’s house? Has an old song ever brought back memories of a first date? The ability to remember relationships between unrelated items (an odor and a location, a song, and an event) is known as associative memory.
Psychologists began studying associative memory in the 1800s, with William James describing the phenomenon in his 1890 classic The Principles of Psychology.
