Priming the Pump: Semantic & Perceptual Priming

Musicum Revelio!

 I have this amazing app installed on my iPad, called Shazam. It can identify pretty much any song that's ever been recorded. I have no idea how it works. As far as I'm concerned, it operates on magic. I shared my theory with a colleague, and he said it probably uses an algorithm called nearest neighbor. Ok, so maybe magic is the wrong explanation. Instead, the app uses a collection of features (e.g., beats per minute, key, and vocal range) to classify the song. That got me thinking...our brain does a similar bit of magic everyday, all the time! Any time you see someone you know or recognize their voice, you just did a quick bit of classification based on very little information. Not only that, it happens almost instantaneously. The brain is super fast at classification. 

If our brain is so freakin' awesome, why does it blow it every once in a while? Have you ever had the experience of recognizing someone's face, but you have no idea what the person's name is or any biographical information about them? You know that you know them, but you don't know how you know them. It usually happens when you see that person out of context. For example, you may see a coworker, but they are at the grocery store instead of the office. It takes longer to recognize them out of context. Why is that the case? 

"Lake Superior! That's the answer to the first question!" —Lane Maxwell

Our mind uses a trick to speed up processing of incoming information. It helps boost efficiency by working within the same semantic space. In other words, classification works better when you know where to look. For example, in the gameshow Wheel of Fortune, they always give the contestants the category before they start solving the puzzle. The categories are often vague (e.g., "before and after" or "around the house"), but at least you don't have to comb through your entire body of knowledge to identify the words. In other words, knowing the category primes you to think about certain things. Eliminating huge swaths of information can help increase processing speeds. Thus, Priming is the phenomena where early information helps speed up processing of later information [1].

How does priming work? If you've been reading this blog, then you can probably anticipate my answer. The Associative Network and Spreading Activation can help explain how priming works. Once a node in the network is active, activation will spread to its nearest neighbors first, and then radiate out to other, related concepts. I would predict that you would be able to identify the song ABC quickly when, right before the song came on, we were talking about the Jackson family. Indeed, this makes intuitive sense. Getting in the mindset helps you become more accurate and faster at processing new information. 

Another example appeared in a previous post where I attempted to use priming to help the reader solve a puzzle. The goal is to find the common connection between three unrelated words: blue, cake, and cottage. Later, on that page, I had a picture of a piece of swiss cheese. My hope was that the image would prime the reader to figure out that the connection between blue, cake, and cottage is cheese. Priming can be our friend. 

There is, however, a downside. Priming doesn't work at a conscious level. In other words, priming happens outside of our awareness. Why would this be a bad thing? One reason why it can be a disservice is that we don't always give proper credit, or attribution, to the source of our ideas. We may think we are being creative and coming up with our own ideas. But as this amazing video demonstrates, that isn't always the case [2].

A STEM Example

How can we use the idea of Priming to help enhance education? It's tough to exploit, mainly because priming operates outside of our conscious awareness. However, a creative educator might engineer a lesson so that she can prime students to answer a logical chain of questions. 

Our stats teacher in college did something like this. We didn't know it at the time, but the lesson was about calculating the standard deviation of a sample. Instead of putting the formula on the board and asking us to memorize it, he started by talking about something (seemingly) unrelated: linear transformations. How would you shift the mean of a set of data, represented as a vertical line, up or down the x-axis? Once we got good at that, he asked us another question: How far away, on average, is each point from the mean? That got us thinking about the spread of the data, and he drew upon something we already knew: how to compute the mean. Finally, we noticed that the difference between the data points were both positive and negative. So we had to figure out a way to standardize that. 

Asking students leading questions, and allowing them to explore the problem space in a structured way, is a good way to exploit the power of priming in education. I am curious to hear in the comments section other ways that we can harness the positive power of priming in education. 

Share and Enjoy! 

Dr. Bob

For More Information

[1] Priming is a very cool concept, but how do we know it's real? What is the scientific evidence that convinced the field that priming is a property of the mind? Early evidence came from a study that asked people to judge whether a string of letters were words (butter) or not (plame). When words were semantically related (e.g., "butter" and "bread"), participants were faster to respond than when they were not related (e.g., "butter" and "nurse"). Of course, we're talking about a difference of 85 milliseconds, but still! That study gave us early evidence that priming was real. 

     Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence upon retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227–234.


[2] Other real-life examples abound in Walter Isaacson's fascinating book The Innovators. His historical analysis of the computer demonstrates time and again that inventors downplay the influence they received by talking with other people or by looking at their prototypes. When a lot of money is at stake, people conveniently ignore the impact of priming on their inventions.