Impact In Social Psychology

INTRODUCTION

The term “priming” bears a long history across the psychological literature and generally refers to the facilitative effects linked to events and actions that trigger significant responses. Therefore, priming comprises of the cognitive phenomenon, which can substantially be predicted on established context-based associations between the response and stimulus (Molden, 2014). Priming and its related modes largely resemble most of the mechanisms behind classical conditioning. Within the purview of social psychology, priming is a process that defines events and actions that are likely to activate the stored knowledge. Besides, it involves activation or resuscitation of social representation determined by stereotypes, traits, and goals and derives social judgments from behaviours. Priming is both a cognitive phenomenon that reverberates subconscious information, as well as a cognitive science that renders the subliminal mental process more visible (Kim, Porter & Goolkasian, 2014). This is largely enabled through scientific investigations.

The effect of priming on the processing speed

Priming is considerably an implicit memory effect where exposure to stimulus essentially influences or impacts the response realized in the next stimulus. It is largely regarded as a technique applied in training people’s memory either in a negative or positive way. Therefore, the processing speed is regarded as a significant aspect of priming that appears across the developmental investigations. Besides, the processing speed can be described around the standard priming effect responded with lexical decision (Snyder & Logan, 2014). However, the strength of the effects essentially decreases with age. The best platform that provides an explanation towards prime effects is semantic information through language comprehension. The cognitive load would always impede the semantic priming, which is a behaviour noted in the semantic activation of speech processing across the adult population. However, semantic processing may differ from one person to another depending on the load conditions and factors surrounding a person (Sliwinski & Buschke,1997). Such factors include attention and speech signal clarity among others. Therefore, the priming effect plays part in both stereotyping and systems at the same time. This can be described through attention given towards response and the increase of frequency in the same response. While taking note of the response and frequency, most of the studies provide interplay between ability and age, and how one can undermine the other.

Research findings about priming

Priming has attracted a number of researches and case studies. Most of them have pointed at common areas and others still showcase differences. Schmidt, Scharenborg & Janse (2015) looked at the self-regulation of the priming effects where three experiments were established. The first experiment looked at lexical decisions without the priming effect. The second experiment involved participants who were essentially primed with prosocial goals. The last experiment looked at the priming goal that focused at being fast in terms of
increasing the driving speed as well as the errors. The findings on the three experiments noted that implementation intentions can be a self-regulatory tool in terms of preventing the unwanted behavioural priming effects. In experiment 1, the implementation intentions contained the contrast effect on the speed of the lexical decisions across the participants who read about the exemplars of extreme slowness and speed (Doyen et al., 2012). In the second experiment, participants formed a goal intention in performing the concentration test with disruption test. The goal-intention participants allowed the disruption to persist for a long period of time compared to participants who had a control prime. In the final experiment, the goal priming procedure was used to prime the participants in joining the dots as fast as possible. They were also tested on a driving simulator where participants primed with the intention of being faster drove very fast and still experienced many mistakes that the control prime participants.

Therefore, the three experiments establish the fact that priming effects presume the aspects of life that can likely hamper the process of goal realization across the population. On the other hand, Markovits et al. (2006) looked at the priming differences in terms of the speed of processing information within the relevant social structure. The researchers noted that previous researches indicated that men and women are likely to have separate interactional contexts noted across the ability and capacity of retaining information. The study tested in the hypothesis of a broad gender differences in terms of latencies behind retrieval of information. The participants in this study were issued with diaries and challenged with dyadic and group items. Based on the findings, female responded rapidly to dyadic information compared to their male counterparts and male responded quickly to group information compared to their female counterparts. Therefore, the research took note of how social information is stored in the memory between the two social groups. This study, however, comes in to work on the priming effect on processing speed (Dresp, 2014). With this determination in place, typing descriptions will highly be involved with participants being primed with the simple concept of fast.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis notes that participants are more likely to be faster when primed with the simple concept of first. This is essentially determined by the typing descriptions and speeds and determination of shapes by the participants.

RESULTS

The mean typing speed for Typing description of shapes when participants were primed with the concept “fast” was 24.47 (seconds) (SD = 11.89). The mean typing speed for typing descriptions of shapes when participants were primed with concept slow was 23.39 (seconds) (SD = 11.75). Figure 1 below shows the mean typing times when primed with fast and slow concepts. A paired sample t-test was used to test whether speed differed when participants were primed with the concept fast and slow. Results showed that there was no significant difference in typing speed when primed with fast verses slow, t (123) = 1.21, p = .229.

and could be filtered out. With repeated cases of the same descriptions under the two primed cases of fast and slow in a series of episodes, the typing speed still maintained the same difference with a tolerance of 2 seconds both on the lower and upper limit. The findings also established longer RTS with more errors for the descriptions than in the words. This expresses a likelihood of longer RTs and errors for the chimeric objects. As much as the typing speed would be fast that it was expected, the accuracy of the typing descriptions remains to be of great concern.

Discussion

This study aimed at examining whether priming fast or slow influenced the speed of creating descriptions for abstract shapes. It was hypothesized that typing speed would be faster when participants were primed with the concept fast. Results indicated that typing speed did not differ significantly when participants were primed with fast verses slow concept. Therefore, the hypothesis was not supported. Perhaps, the priming effect could only be described through other factors that determine the response of people towards stimuli. With slight differences noted when individuals are primed with the concept slow or fast, the response time, and errors while describing abstract objects was quite conspicuous in the experiment. The findings can well be connected to the priming effect before, which is grounded on the variants of priming. The most obvious one that can be attached to the findings above include the subliminal priming, which relies on three significant principles.

The first one revolves around the fact that the stimulus presented should be conceived subconsciously by the immediate subject (Ramscar et al., 2015). Besides, the prime should be introduced for a short period of time, which means that the response should be quick and timed. For one to be assured of the subliminal perception behind the stimulus, the prime should be masked through redundancy as well as content free impulse. In the subliminal priming, the experimenters needs to make sure that the subject takes note or realizes the prime. With the typing speed being the parameter under measurement, it can be seen that the time taken only points out a small difference between the moment the subjects are primed with the concept fast, and when they are primed with the concept slow. This means that the experiment rarely met the requirements of the subliminal perception of the stimulus with most of them taking the two accounts as being the same (Henson et al., 2014).

The findings can be linked to the word concreteness, lexical frequency and imagery in the context of priming (Schmidt & Vancleef, 2016). While some of the descriptions can easily be imagined by people, other descriptions rarely make meaning, and therefore it becomes difficult to create a mental picture about them. This means that even when people are primed with the concept fast, and the description is more abstract, people will take time to imagine the situation before typing. The context, therefore, brings in the idea of word concreteness where people are brought to lexical items (Kristjánsson & Jóhannesson, 2014). The tendency or the closeness of the range between the typing speed when individuals are primed with the concept fast and concept slow basically does not depend on how fast individuals respond to the descriptions, but how best they can formulate meanings from descriptions (Patterson, 2015). Studies conducted on word correctness effect showcase consistent findings on concrete lexical items that can be processed quickly and accurately compared to the abstract concepts across different cognitive tasks (Pichon, Guex & Vuilleumier, 2016).

The tasks essentially include the lexical decision, cognitive recall, and sentence comprehension and word recognition among others. The tasks amount to realization or recognition of the nouns that can suit a particular description in different settings. Under most circumstances, high imagery words can easily be recalled in any memory test compared to low imagery words (Hasenäcker, Beyersmann & Schroeder, 2016). Besides, imageability would interact with significant principle of frequency in accessing significant words that create meaning from descriptions. This explains the two scenarios where individuals are primed with the concept of fast and slow with the results indicating a small gap (Heyman et al., 2015). While some words are easier to find when people are primed with the concept slow, some of them cannot be found or accessed easily when primed with the concept fast. This implies that even when primed with the concept slow and the description is simpler, word processing becomes easier and therefore impacts the typing process or speed (Xiao,Yamauchi & Bowman, 2015). As much as errors can be witnessed in different scenarios, the scale of accuracy is more refined in this case. In another scenario, individuals can be primed with the concept fast, word processing can be difficult thereby reducing the typing speed. The two scenarios explain why being primed with the concept fast and slow may lead to almost same response time and typing speed.

Two significant models can as well be applied in explaining the situation at hand. The first one is referred to as the context availability theory where concrete words can be activated with verbal support, as well as greater contextual associations across the semantic memory. The theory asserts that most of the concrete words would eventually activate the associative information as compared to the abstract terms (Taylor et al., 2018). This yields a faster process in terms of word processing and typing. The second model is the dual coding theory which points out that concrete word are easier to process given that one can easily access the semantic meaning. This also implies the fact that verbal as well as visual semantic representations are made possible even when the situation is itself abstract (Spivey-Knowlton & Tanenhaus, 2015). The semantic context, captured in the duo coding theory, similarly appears in the interactive compensatory model which alludes to the fact that poor lexical decision makers are likely to compensate the process through repetition. However, such a case never appeared in the experiment and the prime effect was equally treated to all participants. This forms one of the reasons as to why the experiment could not be treated as subliminal priming (Locke, 2015). Despite the drawback, it is evident that the typing speed cannot justify the rate of word processing. Other factors need to be put in play to in determining the response of people towards stimuli.

References

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