Primings

Primings are a class of cognitive effects in which exposure to a stimulus influences the response to a later stimulus, often without conscious awareness. The primed stimulus is processed more efficiently, leading to faster recognition, lower error rates, or altered judgments compared with unprimed conditions. Priming can operate across perception, memory, and behavior and can last from fractions of a second to extended periods, depending on the type and context.

There are several broad forms of priming. Perceptual priming improves the identification or processing of repeated sensory features, such as letters, shapes, or textures. Conceptual or semantic priming facilitates processing of meanings that are related in concept or category, such as recognizing a word more quickly after a related word has been encountered. Lexical priming involves facilitated recognition of words, while repetition priming results specifically from the prior presentation of the same stimulus. Affective priming influences evaluations of stimuli based on prior emotional associations, and associative priming can reflect activation of related concepts in memory networks.

Mechanistically, priming is often explained by changes in the accessibility of memory representations. In semantic and lexical priming, spreading activation within a semantic network makes related information more reachable. Perceptual priming is linked to improved efficiency of perceptual representations. Neural correlates include repetition suppression, a reduction in neural activity upon repeated exposure, which accompanies many priming effects.

Research methods include lexical decision tasks, word-stem completion, and perceptual identification, frequently using masked or subliminal primes to probe unconscious processing. While priming is robust in laboratory settings, its external generalizability and boundary with conscious awareness remain active areas of study, as do questions about replication and the mechanisms underlying different priming types.