Priming is an
implicit memory effect in which exposure to one
stimulus influences the response to another stimulus. The seminal experiments of
Meyer and
Schvaneveldt in the early 1970s led to the flowering of research on priming of many sorts. Their original work showed that people were faster in deciding that a string of letters is a word when the word followed an associatively or semantically related word. For example,
NURSE is recognized more quickly following
DOCTOR than following
BREAD. Various experiments supported the theory that activation spreading among related ideas was the best explanation for the facilitation observed in the
lexical decision task. The priming paradigm provides excellent control over the effects of individual stimuli on cognitive processing and associated behavior because the same target stimuli can be presented with different primes. Thus differences in performance as a function of differences in priming stimuli must be attributed to the effect of the prime on the processing of the target stimulus.