Bahrick, H. P. (1969). Discriminative and associative aspects of pictorial paired associate learning: Acquisition and retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80, 113-119.

The Ss were instructed to learn details about 10 pairs of drawings of meaningful objects, including the specific pairings. Four degrees of training were used. After one of four retention intervals each S had to discriminate each drawing from among alternatives of scaled similarity, and then complete tests of associative matching. The entire design was replicated with drawings of meaningless material. It was concluded that discriminative and associative learning begin immediately and proceed independently throughout training with meaningful material. The two aspects are also independently forgotten. With meaningless material associative performance does not improve until some discriminative coding has occurred, but beyond this level the two aspects of learning proceed independently. No forgetting is observed for the discriminative aspects of the meaningless task over a 2-wk. period regardless of degree of training.