Priming is a concept in psychology and psycholinguistics to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus (priming stimulus) on the processing of a second stimulus (target stimulus) that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. How quickly this effect occurs is contested; some researchers claim that priming effects are almost instantaneous. Priming works most effectively 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, or between semantically related words such as "doctor" and "nurse". In 2012, a great amount of priming research was thrown into doubt as part of the replication crisis. Many of the landmark studies that found effects of priming were unable to be replicated in new trials using the same mechanisms. The experimenter effect may have allowed the people running the experiments to subtly influence them to reach the desired result, and publication bias tended to mean that shocking and positive results were seen as interesting and more likely to be published than studies that failed to show any effect of priming. The result is that the efficacy of priming may have been greatly overstated in earlier literature, or have been entirely illusory.
Types
Positive and negative priming The terms positive and negative priming refer to when priming affects the speed of processing. A positive prime speeds up processing, while a negative prime lowers the speed to slower than un-primed levels. Positive priming is caused by simply experiencing the stimulus, while negative priming is caused by experiencing the stimulus, and then ignoring it. Positive priming effects happen even if the prime is not consciously perceived. The effects of positive and negative priming are visible in event-related potential (ERP) readings. Positive priming is thought to be caused by spreading activation. This means that the first stimulus activates parts of a particular representation or association in memory just before carrying out an action or task. The representation is already partially activated when the second stimulus is encountered, so less additional activation is needed for one to become consciously aware of it. Negative priming is more difficult to explain. Many models have been hypothesized, but currently the most widely accepted are the distractor inhibition and episodic retrieval models. In the distractor inhibition model, the activation of ignored stimuli is inhibited by the brain. The episodic retrieval model hypothesizes that ignored items are flagged 'do-not-respond' by the brain. Later, when the brain acts to retrieve this information, the tag causes a conflict. The time taken to resolve this conflict causes negative priming. Although both models are still valid, recent scientific research has led scientists to lean away from the distractor inhibitor model.
Perceptual and conceptual priming The difference between perceptual and conceptual types of priming is whether items with a similar form or items with a similar meaning are primed, respectively. Perceptual priming is based on the form of the stimulus and is enhanced by the match between the early and later stimuli. Perceptual priming is sensitive to the modality and exact format of the stimulus. An example of perceptual priming is the identification of an incomplete word in a word-stem completion test. The presentation of the visual prime does not have to be perfectly consistent with later testing presentations in order to work. Studies have shown that, for example, the absolute size of the stimuli can vary and still provide significant evidence of priming. Conceptual priming is based on the meaning of a stimulus and is enhanced by semantic tasks. For example, the word table will show conceptual priming effects on the word chair, because the words belong to the same category.
Repetition priming
Repetition priming, also called direct priming, is a form of positive priming. When a stimulus is experienced, it is also primed. This means that later experiences of the stimulus will be processed more quickly by the brain. This effect has been found on words in the lexical decision task. There are multiple theories and models that reason why repetition priming might exist. For example, facilitation suggests that when a stimulus overlaps with existing or previously seen representation then information will travel faster.
Semantic priming
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