Associative learning is an essential feature of human cognition, accounting for the influence of priming and interference effects on memory recall. Here, we extend our account of associative learning that learns asymmetric item‐to‐item associations over time via experience (Thomson, Pyke, Trafton, & Hiatt, 2015) by including link maturation to balance associations between longer‐term stability while still accounting for short‐term variability. This account, combined with an existing account of activation strengthening and decay, predicts both human response times and error rates for the fan effect (Anderson, 1974; Anderson & Reder, 1999) for both target and foil stimuli.