A historical example of a learning impediment,
"I saw a missionary labouring earnestly to prove that infierno, hell, and invierno, winter, were not one and the same thing; but as different as heat and cold. The Chaymas are acquainted with no other winter than the season of rains; and consequently they imagined the Hell of the whites to be a place where the wicked are exposed to frequent showers."
Alexander von Humboldt & Aimé Bonpland.(1907) Humboldt's Personal Narrative (Volume 1) (Thomasina Ross, Ed. & transl., 2012) Project Gutenberg eBook
This example is not from science learning, but is reported in the narrative account of the travels of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt when in South America. The indigenous Chaymas are making sense of what they are bring taught by the missionary in terms of their existing fund of interpretive resources. (First they are making an association due to the apparent similarity of two unfamiliar foreign words, then they are linking the new taught concept of hell with their own experience of 'invierno': Winter.)
This can be considered an associative learning impediment where a learners' unanticipated linking of what is being taught with some (irrelevant) prior knowledge or experience interferes with the intended teaching.
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