What is priming?

What is priming?

Priming is a change of response to a stimulus ''caused by the previous presentation of the same or similar stimulus''. A good example to see how priming works in our daily life would be to look at how people often find it easier to recognize words or names of different objects/fruits/animals etc. that are familiar to them.

In other words priming occurs when we are presented with one stimulus (the priming stimulus) which changes our response to a subsequent test stimulus (the test stimulus). This can be done either positively (positive priming) which increases the speed/accuracy of the response to the test stimulus or negatively (negative priming) which causes the decrease in the speed/accuracy of response to the test stimulus.

There are two main types of priming: repetition priming and conceptual priming. I have mentioned few things about repetiton priming at the beginning. One might repeat the word orange faster than pamelo etc. Conceptual priming on the other hand occurs when the enhancement caused by priming stimulus is based on the meaning of the stimulus. An example would be that a ''presentation of the word furniture might cause you to respond faster to later presentation of the word chair''.

An example of studying repetition priming is when after being presented with some stimuli participants are given a lexical decision task were they have to indicate whether a word is real or a non world. The reaction times for deciding if its a word or non-word are faster for earlier presented words --> repetition priming

Conceptual priming is based on the meaning of words, where being presented with the word chair will result in a priming effect on the word table, as both belong to the category furniture and this is a part of our semantic knowledge.