Rationale. Associative learning underpins behaviours that are fundamental to the everyday functioning of the individual. Evidence pointing to learning deficits in recreational drug users merits further examination. Objectives. A word pair learning task was administered to examine associative learning processes in ecstasy/polydrug users. Methods. Conclusions. Overall, the results suggest that long-term ecstasy exposure may induce a deficit in associative learning and this may be in part a consequence of users adopting a more liberal decision criterion value.