With so much research being done on Artificial Intelligence and learning, it is striking that all research seems to concentrate on reinforcement learning, while research on associative learning almost doesn't exist. When you do find research on associative learning, it seems to be reinforcement learning in disguise. What's up with this?
The difference between associative learning and reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning means that an agent is rewarded for doing something right and punished for doing something wrong. In Artificial Intelligence, an evaluation function is used to determine how good the result of an action was. Usually as a result a neural network is adjusted. Associative learning is based on making associations between things happening. When the sky is dark, we know that it's going to rain. Why? Because we have seen dark sky and rain together many times, and have associated dark skies with rain.
Pavlov's dog
Everyone knows the experiment of Pavlov on dogs. When he fed his dog, he sounded a bell. The dog made an association between the bell and the food. when ever he heard the bell, saliva started dripping from his mouth in anticipation of the food.
Associative learning in computers
Why is there almost no research to associative computer learning? This is the way we train our own brains. It is very close to the essence of how we think. It seems to me that it can not be very hard to implement this: Just monitor the parts of the computer system, and when two parts are activated at the same time, create a link between the two, and make this link stronger every time this occurs.
This would be especially practical in swarm intelligence systems like describe. You could build a special swarm that does just this: Look at the energy levels and create links between places with high activity by leaving trails. Then in the future, when one gets activated, the other gets activated too. Furthermore, since the trails go away gradually, the association will be broken once the two don't get activated at the same time anymore.
Have AI researchers always just overlooked this simple possibility, or is there something fundamentally wrong with my reasoning? Would my proposed system work?