Priming (Psychology)

Priming is a concept in psychology and psycholinguistics describing how exposure to one stimulus can influence a person's response to a later stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect is the positive or negative influence a rapidly presented priming stimulus has on the processing of a target stimulus that appears shortly afterward, and it generally depends on some relationship, positive or negative, between the two stimuli; for example, the word nurse tends to be recognized more quickly after the word doctor than after the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic or conceptual, and it has been studied in relation to word recognition, semantic processing, attention and unconscious processing, working most effectively when both stimuli share the same sensory modality though it can also occur across modalities. In 2012 much of the existing priming research was thrown into doubt as part of psychology's broader replication crisis, when many landmark priming studies could not be reproduced in new trials, leading researchers to suspect that experimenter effects and publication bias had overstated the effect's reliability in earlier literature, or that some earlier reported effects had been illusory altogether.