Priming (psychology)

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Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.^[1][2][3] The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus (priming stimulus) on the processing of a second stimulus (target stimulus) that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. Onset of priming effects can be almost instantaneous.^[4]

Priming works most effectively when the two stimuli are in the same modality. For example, visual priming works best with visual cues and verbal priming works best with verbal cues. But priming also occurs between modalities,^[5] or between semantically related words such as "doctor" and "nurse".^[6][7]

Priming research in terms of behavioral priming is in doubt due to the replication crisis,^[8] publication bias,^[9] and the experimenter effect.^[10]