Priming (psychology)

Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus.Gladwell, Malcolm 2005. Blink: the power of thinking without thinking. Little, Brown: New York. Chapter 1.  Experiments in the early 1970s showed that people were faster recognising a word, when the word followed a related word. For example, NURSE is recognized more quickly following DOCTOR than following BREAD. Activation spreading among related ideas was the best explanation for this effect. In experiments the same target stimuli can be presented with different primes. This allows the priming effect to be measured.

Priming can occur following  perceptual, semantic, or conceptual stimulus repetition. For example, if 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 he or she will answer table is greater than if they are not primed. Another example is if people see an incomplete sketch they are unable to identify and they are shown more of the sketch until they recognize the picture, later they will identify the sketch at an earlier stage than was possible for them the first time.Kolb & Whishaw: Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology (2003), page 453-454, 457.

Priming effects are independent of simple recognition memory. Unconscious priming effects can affect word choice on a word-stem completion test long after the words have been consciously forgotten.

Priming works best when the two stimuli are in the same modality. For example, visual priming works best with visual cues and verbal priming works best with verbal cues. But priming also occurs between modalities,Several researchers, for example, have used cross-modal priming to investigate syntactic deficits in individuals with damage to Broca's area of the brain.  See the following:

Swinney, D., E. Zurif, P. Prather, and T. Love (1993). "The neurological distribution of processing operations underlying language comprehension." Manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego.
For an overview, see also Zurif E.B. 1995. Brain regions of relevance to syntactic rocessing. in Knowledge of meaning: an introduction to semantic theory, eds. Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal. MIT Press. or between semantically related words such as "doctor" and "nurse".

 Related pages 
Adaptive unconscious

References

Category:Cognition
Category:Memory