The Importance of Priming Effects in Psychology

Psychologists discovered that exposure to a word causes immediate and measurable changes in the ease with which related words can be evoked. If you have recently seen or heard the word eat, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment, s o, blank, p, as soup, than as soap. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen wash. We call this a priming effect, and say that the idea of eat primes the idea of soup, and that wash primes soup. Another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. Like ripples on a pond, activation spreads through a small