One form is serial memorization, as in memorizing poetry or lines of a play. In a laboratory experiment, a list of words is memorized from beginning to end, so that each word in the list is in some sense the stimulus for the word to follow.

The second form is paired-associate learning, which is comparable to the method sometimes used in learning the words of a foreign language. The words are learned in stimulus-response pairs, such as prepared-afraid, careless-vacant, hungry-quiet; a stimulus word is presented, and the response word has to be learned.