Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This explains how recently and frequently activated knowledge comes to mind easily. Priming occurs when an idea or category is both activated and applicable to a current situation. For example, people primed with hostile adjectives can interpret an ambiguous situation that follows in hostile terms. Priming only occurs when people are unaware that the prime is related to the way they interpret the situation. Priming can affect people's judgments, moods, and longterm interpretations of stimuli ( Srull & Wyer, 1980 ). Priming especially biases encoding rather than retrieval of information, so primes have the most impact if they precede the relevant stimulus. Priming occurs either because of the recency or the frequency of the category primed, depending on the decay of the prime and how often it was activated ( Higgins, Bargh, & Lombardi, 1985 ) ( see also accessibility ). ( 1985 ). The nature of priming effects on categorization . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 11 , 59 – 69 . ( 1980 ). Category accessibility and social perception: Some implications for the study of person memory and interpersonal judgments . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 38 , 841 – 56 . ... log in or subscribe to read full text