Associations are all we need

In this opinion article, I argue that the time has come for a unified radical associationism that is built around the assumption that associations are all we have and probably all we need to account for mental activities. This radical associationism should be able to merge the fields of associative, statistical and Hebbian learning and unify these theoretical and empirical approaches. A direct consequence of adopting such a theoretical stance is a revision of several key psychological concepts (e.g., the notion of attention) based on neurobiological ones, leading to a unified neuro-psychological theorization of mental activities.