Priming: Constraint Satisfaction and Interactive Competition

Abstract

Priming influences holistic representations of social situations and subsequent actions through interactive competition among relevant concepts such as the prime, the self, a partner, or other features of the environment. The constraints among these representations stem from culturally shared affective meanings of concepts acquired in socialization. Our theory is implemented in a localist connectionist model, which in simulations reproduced major experimental results on priming. The neural plausibility of our proposal comes from semantic pointers, a neural mechanism that integrates symbolic concepts with underlying emotional and sensorimotor processes. The compositional nature of semantic pointers also explains the interaction of priming with more deliberate and intentional forms of social cognition.