Priming (psychology)
Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual.
[8][9] 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.
[10] 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.
[14] The effects of positive and negative priming are visible in event-related potential (ERP) readings.
[14] This means that the first stimulus activates parts of a particular representation or association in memory just before carrying out an action or task.
Perceptual priming is based on the form of the stimulus and is enhanced by the match between the early and later stimuli.
Studies have shown that, for example, the absolute size of the stimuli can vary and still provide significant evidence of priming.
For example, facilitation suggests that when a stimulus overlaps with existing or previously seen representation than information will travel faster.
For example, an experiment by Donald Foss researched the decay time of semantic facilitation in lists and sentences.
[28][29] The masked priming paradigm has been widely used in the last two decades in order to investigate both orthographic and phonological activations during visual word recognition.
Some research suggests that valence (positive vs. negative) has a stronger effect than arousal (low vs. high) on lexical-decision tasks.
[48]: 187 In contrast, their counterparts who view western images are more likely to give a reverse response and focus more on that individual fish.
[53] For example, in one study, identification accuracy of old Chinese characters was significantly higher than baseline measurements (i.e., the priming effect), while identification accuracy of novel characters was significantly lower than baseline measurements (i.e., the anti-priming effect).
[54] Anti-priming is said to be the natural antithesis of repetition priming, and it manifests when two objects share component features, thereby having overlapping representations.
[56][57] Priming is often considered to play a part in the success of sensory branding of products and connected to ideas like crossmodal correspondencies and sensation transference.
Known effects are e.g. consumers perceiving lemonade suddenly as sweeter when the logo of the drink is more saturated towards yellow,[58] although this result has not yet been replicated by an independent study.
[60] Nobel laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called on priming researchers to check the robustness of their findings in an open letter to the community, claiming that priming has become a "poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.
[65] Patients with amnesia are described as those who have suffered damage to their medial temporal lobe, resulting in the impairment of explicit recollection of everyday facts and events.
[67][68] Phrasing of the instructions associated with the test has had a dramatic impact on an amnesic's ability to complete the task successfully.
This dissociation was extended to other linguistic categories such phonology and syntactic processing by Blumstein, Milberg and their colleagues.
[70] Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, have been studied extensively as far as priming goes.
[73] Priming while improving performance decreases neural processing in the cerebral cortex of sensory stimuli with stimulus repetition.
This has been found in single-cell recordings[74] and in electroencephalography (EEG) upon gamma waves,[75] with PET[76] and functional MRI.
[77] This reduction is due to representational sharpening in the early sensory areas which reduces the number of neurons representing the stimulus.
This leads to a more selective activation of neurons representing objects in higher cognitive areas.
[78] Conceptual priming has been linked to reduced blood flow in the left prefrontal cortex.
[79] The left prefrontal cortex is believed to be involved in the semantic processing of words, among other tasks.
Subjects were implicitly primed with words related to the stereotype of elderly people (example: Florida, forgetful, wrinkle).
For example, a 2012 study suggested that presented with a depressed patient who "self-stereotypes herself as incompetent, a therapist can find ways to prime her with specific situations in which she had been competent in the past... Making memories of her competence more salient should reduce her self-stereotype of incompetence.
