Semantic Priming

Semantic priming is the finding that people respond faster and more accurately to a word or concept when it is preceded by a related word, called the prime, than when it is preceded by an unrelated word, even when the amount of time available to process the prime is very brief. In a typical laboratory demonstration using a lexical decision task, in which participants must quickly judge whether a string of letters is a real word, people confirm that a string such as nurse is a real word more quickly when it follows the related prime doctor than when it follows an unrelated prime such as bread. The psychologists David Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt reported foundational experiments demonstrating the effect in 1971, and it has since become one of the most widely used tools for investigating how concepts are organized and interconnected in semantic memory, since the size of the priming benefit between any two words is generally taken as a rough index of how closely associated those two concepts are within a person's underlying knowledge network. Semantic priming effects have been documented across a wide range of related task formats and stimulus types, and researchers have used variations in the effect, such as how it changes with the delay between prime and target or with a person's conscious awareness of the prime, to test competing theoretical accounts of automatic versus deliberate processes in memory retrieval.