Contiguity is a series of things in continuous connection, a grouping of parts in contiguous physical contact. The concept was first set out in the Law of Contiguity, one of
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
's Laws of Association, which states that things which occur in proximity to each other in
timeTime is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects...
or
spaceSpace is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional...
are readily associated.
A cluster of genes that are located close to one another at a chromosome locus.
Contiguity is a series of things in continuous connection, a grouping of parts in contiguous physical contact. The concept was first set out in the Law of Contiguity, one of
AristotleAristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.Together with Plato and Socrates , Aristotle is one of...
's Laws of Association, which states that things which occur in proximity to each other in
timeTime is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects...
or
spaceSpace is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional...
are readily associated.
Biology
A cluster of genes that are located close to one another at a chromosome locus. Contiguous gene disorders result from deletions or duplications of a chromosome segment, thus causing a contiguous gene imbalance.
Computer science
Elements of memory are contiguous if they are, or appear to be, adjacent or connected to one another.
Geography
Lands which are in physical contact with one another. In the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, for example, the "
48 contiguous statesThe term contiguous United States refers to the 48 U.S. states located on the North American continent south of the border with Canada, plus the District of Columbia....
" exclude the states of
HawaiiHawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states, and is the only state made up entirely of islands. It is located on an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of Australia. The state was admitted to the Union on August...
and
AlaskaAlaska is the largest state of the United States of America by area; it is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
, which do not share borders with other
U.S. stateA U.S. state is any one of 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government . Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile...
s.
Two or more contiguous
municipalitiesA municipality is an administrative entity composed of a clearly defined territory and its population and commonly denotes a city, town, or village, or a small grouping of them. A municipality is typically governed by a mayor and a city council or municipal council.The notion of municipality...
can be consolidated into one, or one municipality can consist of many noncontiguous elements. For example, the
Financially Distressed Municipalities ActThe Financially Distressed Municipalities Act , also known as Act 47, empowers the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development to declare certain municipalities as financially distressed...
allows the state of
PennsylvaniaThe Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , often colloquially referred to as PA by natives and Northeasterners, is a state located in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States...
to merge contiguous municipalities to reduce
financial distressFinancial distress is a term in Corporate Finance used to indicate a condition when promises to creditors of a company are broken or honored with difficulty. Sometimes financial distress can lead to bankruptcy...
.
Geographic contiguity is important in
biologyBiology is the natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy...
, especially
animal rangesIn biology, the range or distribution of a species is the geographical area within which that species can be found. Within that range, dispersion is variation in local density.The term is often qualified:...
. For a particular species, its habitat may be a 'contiguous range', or it might be broken, requiring periodic, typically seasonal migrations; (see:
Disjunct distributionIn biology, a taxon with a disjunct distribution is one that has two or more groups that are related but widely separated from each other geographically. The causes are varied and might demonstrate either the expansion or contraction of a species range...
). The same concept of contiguous range is true for human transportation studies in an attempt to understand census geography. It also comes into play with electoral geography and politics.
Philosophy
Philosophers speak of contiguity when they assume two events or objects lying directly side by side in space and time without being connected by causality or any other principle.
Physics
Contiguity is a metallurgical property used to characterize microstructure of materials. It is computed by finding the ratio of solid-solid length to the sum of solid-solid and solid-liquid length of the microstructure.
Probability theory
Contiguity of sequences of probability measures is a property that may be used to derive asymptotic normality under the alternative of a statistical hypothesis. It is defined for a sequence of measurable spaces with two probability measure sequences, and . is
contiguous to if
as , and
is
bi-contiguous to if
as .
The concept was originally introduced by
Lucien Le CamLucien Marie Le Cam was a mathematician and statistician born in Croze, Creuse, France. He obtained a Ph.D...
in the 1960s as part of his contribution to the development of abstract general asymptotic theory in mathematical statistics.
Psychology
Association by contiguity is the principle that ideas, memories, and experiences are linked when one is frequently experienced with the other. For example, if you constantly see a knife and a fork together they become linked (associated). The more these two items (stimuli) are perceived together the stronger the link between them. When one of the memories becomes activated later on, the linked (contiguously associated) memory becomes temporarily more activated and thus easier to be called into working memory. This process is known as
primingPriming in psychology occurs when an earlier stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. For example, when a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tab, the probability that subject answers table is higher than for non-primed...
, and the initial memory that primed the other is known as the retrieval cue.
Association by contiguity is the root of association by similarity. Association by similarity is the idea that one memory primes another through their common property or properties. Thus, an apple may prime a memory of a rose through the common property of red. These two become associated even though you may have never experienced an apple and a rose together (consistent with association by contiguity).
When one associated memory, a group of associated memories, or a whole line of associated memories becomes primed, this is known as
spreading activationSpreading activation is a method for searching associative networks, neural networks or semantic networks. The search process is initiated by labeling a set of source nodes with weights or "activation" and then iteratively propagating or "spreading" that activation out to other nodes linked to the...
.
In
conditioningConditioning may refer to:* In probability theory, the use of conditional probabilities, expectations and distributions; see conditioning * In mathematics, the property of a matrix as "well-conditioned" or "ill-conditioned"; see condition number...
, contiguity refers to how associated a
reinforcerIn operant conditioning, reinforcement occurs when an event following a response causes an increase in the probability of that response occurring in the future...
is with behaviour. The higher the contiguity between events the greater the strength of the behavioural relationship.
Edwin Ray GuthrieEdwin Ray Guthrie was an American behavioral psychologist. Educated at the University of Nebraska and the University of Pennsylvania, he played an important role in the development of the contiguity theory of learning...
's contiguity theory deals with patterned movements.