Sante Simms

Priming may be explained as this, but it is also the pre-activation of a mental representation. This representation can be a word, a concept, an object. In psycholinguistics, priming is used to discover the mental links between words. For instance, in some of Dr. Ken Forster's experiments (University of Arizona) Experiment participants will be asked to decide if a word is a correct word in the English language by pressing no or yes.(Lexical Decision task) They are shown the word-doctor, presented so fast they are not aware of it. Then they are shown the target word-nurse. They respond quicker to the two words if they are related than if they are not semantically related. This indicates that the first word activates something that brings up the second word faster than if the words are not related. Some researchers claim interactive activation, neural nets and some researchers claim another type of connection. But, the phenomena that one word can pre-activate another in the same semantic category is called semantic priming. It's like the old "word-association" test, what is the first word that comes to mind with the word, cat... Mental models and categorization are strongly related and the impact of these should be considered when selecting words. I strongly recommend the reader consult Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things, for an excellent primer of how all these concepts work together. Lisa Elliott Engineering Psychology, graduate student New Mexico State University

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