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A history of “priming” research that analyzes the field's underlying assumptions and experimental protocols to shed new light on a contemporary crisis in social psychology. In 2012, a team of Belgian scientists reported that they had been unable to replicate a canonical experiment in the field of psychology known as “priming.” The original experiment, performed by John Bargh in the nineties, had purported to show that words connoting old age unconsciously influenced—or primed—research subjects, causing them to walk more slowly. When subsequent researchers could not replicate these results, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman warned of a “train wreck looming” if Bargh and his colleagues could not address doubts about their work. Since then, the inability to replicate other well-known priming experiments has helped precipitate an ongoing debate over what has gone wrong in psychology, raising fundamental questions about the soundness of research practices in the field. Anatomy of a Train Wreck offers the first detailed history of priming research from its origins in the early 1980s to its recent collapse. Ruth Leys places priming experiments in the context of contemporaneous debates over not only the nature of automaticity but also the very foundations of social psychology. While these latest discussions about priming have largely focused on methodology—including sloppy experimental practices, inadequate statistical methods, and publication bias—Leys offers a genealogy of the theoretical expectations and scientific paradigms that have guided and motivated priming research itself. Examining scientists'intellectual strategies, their responses to criticism, and their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity, Anatomy of a Train Wreck raises crucial questions about the evidence surrounding unconscious influence and probes the larger stakes of the replication crisis: psychology's status as a science.

This book brings together research in cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology to construct a psychologically plausible account of grammar as a mental network. To explore the organisation of this network, the author examines evidence from structural priming, which occurs when speakers'processing of a grammatical construction is affected by prior exposure to the same or a similar construction. Previous experimental findings are innovatively reinterpreted to shed light on various aspects of the grammatical network, including the strength of the similarities between constructions, the level of abstraction at which they are represented and the ways in which similar constructions can either boost or inhibit each other. Moreover, new experiments are reported that extend structural priming to phenomena like the resultative, the depictive and the caused-motion construction. The book is directed at theoretical linguists, psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists alike, showcasing how recent work in these areas can be integrated and extended.

Der Priming-Ansatz beschreibt in der Kommunikationswissenschaft, wie Medien-Primes die Vorstellungen, Entscheidungen und Handlungen der Rezipienten prägen können. So können Rezipienten etwa durch Begriffe (z. B. „Folter“) oder durch Deutungsmuster (z. B. „Guantanamo-Frame“) in einem Zeitungsartikel oder in einem Blogeintrag auf eine bestimmte Sichtweise (z. B. kritische Haltung zu den USA) geprimet werden.Das Buch behandelt die kognitionspsychologische Herkunft des Ansatzes, stellt die beiden Lesarten nach Iyengar und Kinder sowie nach Price und Tewksbury vor und stellt die Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede des Priming-Ansatzes zu ähnlichen Konzepten wie Agenda-Setting, Framing und instrumenteller Aktualisierung her. Darüber hinaus werden Schlüsselstudien und zentrale methodische Umsetzungen kritisch diskutiert.

How incidentally activated social representations affect subsequent thoughts and behaviors has long interested social psychologists. Recently, such priming effects have provoked debate and skepticism. Originally a special issue of Social Cognition, this book examines the theoretical challenges researchers must overcome to further advance priming studies and considers how these challenges can be met. The volume aims to reduce the confusion surrounding current discussions by more thoroughly considering the many phenomena in social psychology that the term “priming” encompasses, and closely examining the psychological processes that explain when and how different types of priming effects occur.

Priming is the implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. It can occur following perceptual, semantic or conceptual stimulus repetition. In this book, the authors present topical research on the psychology of priming. Some of the topics discussed include empirical investigations on priming or word-stem completion; neural correlates of repetition priming; lexical and syntactic priming in language comprehension; exploring the contradictory results on the cross-modal priming effect in normal aging; facilitation of content-specific prior memory procedures; nonword stimluli and the effect of adult aging on episodic priming; rime priming effects in the auditory word recognition and priming in visual search.

'This volume features a collection of empirical studies which use priming methods to explore the comprehension, production, and acquisition of second language (L2) phonology, syntax, and lexicon. The term priming refers to the phenomenon in which prior exposure to specific language forms or meanings influences a speaker's subsequent language comprehension or production. This book brings together the various strands of priming research into a single volume that specifically addresses the interests of researchers, teachers, and students interested in L2 teaching and learning. Chapters by internationally known scholars feature a variety of priming techniques, describe various psycholinguistic tasks, and focus on different domains of language knowledge and skills. The book is conceptualized with a wide audience in mind, including researchers not familiar with priming methods and their application to L2 research, graduate students in second language acquisition and related disciplines, and instructors who require readings for use in their courses.'

Title from ebook title screen (viewed on June 14, 2005).