ABSTRACT
There are a number of procedures that can be described as involving priming. What they have in common is an attempt to influence a subject’s response to a test item by presenting some priming information immediately prior to the test item. The priming task have found most useful for examining the processes of comprehension is item recognition. Priming in item recognition as a procedure for investigating comprehension can be compared both to other procedures for investigating comprehension and to other kinds of priming procedures. There are two different notions of automaticity. One is that of Schneider and Shiffrin and it concerns the relationship between a stimulus and the response to that stimulus, and how that relationship can become automatic with practice. The other notion of automaticity, the one which will be used for discussing priming, concerns the relationship between one concept and another, that is, whether one concept automatically activates another.
