Priming

What is Priming?

Cognitive and neuropsychological evidence indicates that priming reflects the operation of nondeclarative (implicit) or nonconscious processes that can be dissociated from those that support declarative (explicit) or conscious recollection of past experiences.

Two forms of priming: perceptual priming Opens in new window and conceptual priming have been described in the literature.

1. Perceptual priming occurs when repeated presentation of a stimulus leads to facilitated processing of its perceptual features. For example, it is easier to identify a degraded stimulus if it is has recently been encountered.
2. Conceptual priming, in contrast, occurs when repeated presentation of a stimulus leads to facilitated processing of its meaning. For example, we can decide faster whether an object is living or non-living if we saw it recently.

Priming is essentially the capability of previous experience to affect recall without any conscious awareness that this is taking place. It is an activation of unconscious context.

This is a different kind of memory use than conscious recollection, and it takes place all of the time in the everyday phenomenon called recognition.

We recognize objects, people, and their names automatically, without ever realizing that this use of knowledge is an act of memory.

A musical example of priming would be feeling that there is something familiar about a musical phrase that is like one we have heard earlier in the same piece.

There is also evidence that certain other types of learning can take place without our conscious awareness. Our learning of certain types of syntactical information seems to be implicit. (Here the term syntactical is used in a broad sense, referring to any systematic aspect of a situation.)

It seems we can learn rule systems of relations between elements without ever consciously trying to memorize them. We do this all the time when we produce new, grammatical sentences without having to remember the rules of grammar, many of which we may not consciously know anyway.

This general type of memory can also relate to other kinds of systems, as when we realize that an object in a familiar room has been moved, without ever having consciously memorized the positions of objects in that room. This type of nondeclarative memory Opens in new window appears to be important musically in the recognition of syntactical structures like tonality.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of priming is that it occurs whether or not there is declarative memory Opens in new window recognition for what has been presented. In fact, priming can occur when exposures are so brief that people cannot even be aware that something was presented.

Neurological evidence also supports the classification of priming as nondeclarative learning Opens in new window. Apparently, there is a lack of hippocampal activity (necessary for declarative memory) during priming’s exposure and recall phases.

Finally, priming even seems to operate by different rules than declarative memory. For example, the priming effect is unrelated to whether information is encoded deeply or shallowly.

One thing is certain, nondeclarative memory Opens in new window and priming play a role in learning and recall. For example, priming can facilitate retrieval and performance even when people have forgotten the learning event.

Knowledge of priming functions can be useful in cases of anterograde amnesia Opens in new window where the individual has little or no ability for new declarative learning.

For instance, neuropsychological case studies have reported the successful learning of computer skills in individuals who could not recall being taught the skills and denied any knowledge of the skills.

Another educational application of priming is that learning can be improved through pre-exposure to stimuli. For example, using an advance organizer before a lesson can be considered an example of conceptual priming.