Our Inherent Need for Associative Coherence.

The world around us consists of typical settings manifested as statistical regularities and stored as associations. These associations are beneficial for performance and serve as a source of stability in our perception of a coherent surroundings. What happens when such associativity is not apparent? We presented pairs of associated images and pairs of non-associated images and compared their corresponding effect on subsequent performance in three different visual perception paradigms: contrast-sensitivity, global vs. local perception, and critical-flicker-fusion. In all three experiments, performance was significantly inferior when preceded by images with no clear associative connection. We argue that these results reflect our inherent need to find coherence in our environment. When it is not easily detected, we continue to seek an associative link, which in our case persisted and posed a cognitive load on subsequent performance.