A classical bidirectional associative memory (BAM) suffers from low storage capacity and abundance of spurious memories though it has the properties of good generalization and noise immunity. In this paper, Hamming distance in recall procedure of usual asymmetrical BAM is replaced with modified Hamming distance by introducing weighting matrix into connection matrix. This generalization is validated to increase storage capacity, to lessen spurious memories, to enhance noise immunity, and to enable multiple association using simulation work. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.