Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite the fact that priming is one of the most studiedphenomena in cognitive psychology, many questions remainabout exactly when, why and under what task conditions weought to observe priming in the lab, and what types ofrelationships between words or concepts reliably lead topriming. This project contrasted two priming experimentswhere the primary manipulation was the decision the subjectswere making about words (as well as manipulating otherfactors, like relatedness proportion, known to affect priming).We found evidence that: 1) automatic priming forsemantically related words does happen under someconditions, but 2) semantic priming, and whether it happensindependent of association, is dependent on the task in whichparticipants are engaged. These results provide evidence forthe context sensitive nature of the activation of semanticmemory.