PRIMING SCAVENGER HUNT: More options to consider in designing priming experiments (6 hours)

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There are a lot of different ways to do a priming experiment—there are different kinds of relationships between prime and target words, different ways you can present the primes and targets, and different tasks you can make the participants do in order to measure their reaction time. These may all affect the results. For example, the experiment you did used associative priming (when the prime and target have related meanings—more specifically, when the prime is a word that is closely associated with the target, or vice versa), and in associative priming experiments a target is responded to faster if it's preceded by a related prime and responded to slower if it's preceded by an unrelated prime. In other types of priming experiments, related primes might not speed up (or might even slow down) reactions to the target.

Below I have provided a list of different kinds of priming relationships and different ways to do priming experiments. After that, I have provided a list of references. We are going to do a scavenger hunt: given this list of features of priming experiments, I want you to find examples from the list of papers I have provided.

For each kind of priming experiment, list one paper (from this list) that uses that method, and give a brief explanation or example of how it works. (For types of priming relationships, the easiest way to explain is with an example—e.g., you can explain "morphological priming" by giving an example of a prime and a target, and pointing out how they are related.) These explanations should be in your own words. For example, for "Associative (semantic)" priming, you might list Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (2000), and an explanation like "The meaning of the target is related to the meaning of the prime, such as when the prime is 卫生 ['hygiene'] and the target is 洁净 ['clean']."

Remember, you don't need to carefully read every word of every paper! You can just skim the papers to understand the basic idea of their experiment design and see which type of priming it is. Being able to identify a particular piece of information that you need from a paper, and then skim the paper to find just that information rather than reading the entire thing, is a useful research skill, so it will be good to practice it now.

It is ok to use the same paper more than once in this activity.

There are many different strategies you can use to try to complete this task. You could first look up explanations of each thing in the list (e.g., look up the definition of "masked priming", the definition of "mediated priming", etc.) and then specifically search for papers that have those. Or you could look at a paper first, and browse the paper until you understand which kind of priming it used, and then see where it fits within this list. Or you could use a mixture of these strategies, or another strategy you think of.

By the end of this activity, you will be familiar with many different ways of doing a priming experiment (and hopefully with what their advantages and disadvantages are), and you will have practice with how to read and understand academic papers.

Scavenger hunt

The list below has 16 features of priming experiments to look for. To earn an A for this activity, you must find at least 12 of them (<12 = B; <9 = D). If you're feeling ambitious, you can try to find all 16! You may work with up to 3 partners on this.

In order to receive credit, you must have a correct reference (author names and date, for example, "Pelzl et al., 2021") and correct (and not plagiarized) example/explanation for each item you choose. You should describe the feature clearly so that someone who has not taken this class will understand what the feature is. For instance, if you're describing semantic priming, you should describe what semantic priming is using words other than 'semantic', not just say "semantic priming is when a prime word semantically primes a target." 

Note: Please do NOT write long summaries of the articles. Just explain what each of the features listed below is, provide examples of appropriate words/stimuli for each feature, and indicate which study or studies helped you understand each feature. Blank Answer Sheet with example answer (MS Word document).

Papers to search

NOTE: This is a good chance to learn how to access papers through the PolyU library. Some of the links below go to journal websites that will only give you partial access, but the library can usually get you access to the whole paper. Just copy the article title and use 'One Search' to find the paper through the library.

When you finish this activity, your group should submit your article list and examples/explanations via Blackboard. Only one person needs to submit the assignment, just be sure to include everyone's names on the submission.

by Eric Pelzl, modification of original content by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2026-JAN-28. CC-BY-4.0.