Mediated Priming Effect

The mediated priming effect is a finding in semantic priming research, documented as a variant of semantic priming elsewhere in this section, in which a prime word can speed recognition of a target word even when the two are not directly associated with one another, provided they are both strongly associated with a third, unstated concept that connects them, such as the word lion speeding recognition of the word stripes even though lions and stripes are not typically associated directly, because both are strongly associated with the intervening concept tiger. The psychologists David Balota and Robert Lorch demonstrated the effect experimentally in the mid-1980s using a lexical decision task, showing a measurable priming benefit for such indirectly related word pairs that could not be explained by any direct association between the prime and the target themselves. The finding has been used as evidence for spreading activation models of semantic memory in which presenting a word activates not only its own directly associated concepts but sends a weaker, secondary wave of activation onward to concepts associated with those first concepts in turn, so that a target word can still receive a boost in activation through a chain of associations even when no direct link to the prime exists in memory.