associative

Etymology

From associate + -ive.

adj

1. Pertaining to, resulting from, or characterised by association; capable of associating; tending to associate or unite.
   At present conditioning is viewed as a special case of associative learning which provides an animal (and human being alike) with die ability to discover, memorize, retrieve, and use relationships between signals and reinforcers and also to control rewards and aversive events. 1998, Kazimierz Zieliński, “Pairing, Continuity, Contingency - What's the Difference”, in Anna Neugebauer, editor, Macromolecular Interplay in Brain Associative Mechanisms: Proceedings of the International School of Biocybernetics, World Scientific, page 63
   Sometimes the attempt was made to reduce the inner to the outer world (Condillac, Mach, Avenarius, materialism); sometimes the outer to the inner world (Descartes, Berkeley, Fichte); sometimes the sphere of the absolute to the others (e.g., by trying to infer causally the essence and existence of something divine in general); […]; sometimes one's own body to a merely associative coordination of the self-perception of the own self and organ sensations with the own body as perceived from outside. 2014, Volker Meja, Nico Stehr, Knowledge and Politics
2. (algebra, of a binary operator *) Such that, for any operands a,b and c, (a*b)*c=a*(b*c); (of a ring, etc.) whose multiplication operation is associative.
   Perhaps it is an advantage of the "associative algebraic geometry" we have tried to develop in foregoing chapters that it is independent of braidings and further generalizations because it will remain valid as long as the corresponding "function"-rings constructed in these theories are associative algebras. 2000, Freddy Van Oystaeyen, Algebraic Geometry for Associative Algebras, Marcel Dekker, page 235
   It is now generally accepted that the representation theory of associative algebras traces its origin to Hamilton's description of the complex numbers by pairs of real numbers. 2006, Ibrahim Assem, Daniel Simson, Andrzej Skowroński, Elements of the Representation Theory of Associative Algebras, 1: Techniques of Representation Theory, Cambridge University Press, page vii
   In this section we develop the basic theory of normed algebras, putting special emphasis on the case of complete normed unital associative complex algebras. 2014, Miguel Cabrera García, Ángel Rodríguez Palacios, Non-Associative Normed Algebras, Volume 1: The Vidav–Palmer and Gelfand-Naimark Theorems, Cambridge University Press, page 1
3. (computing) Addressable by a key more complex than an integer index.
   AWK's associative arrays may be indexed by strings.
   Associative memories were once given considerable attention.