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Laura Hiatt, 4:00pm Tuesday February 27th

Hiatt

Laura Hiatt

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

    Tuesday, February 27th
    Swift 107
    4:00pm (Reception to follow)

Priming in Human Cognition

Priming is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon that helps to guide how people think, see and act. Priming is based on connections in the mind, where items or objects that are the focus of attention prime related items in memory, guiding one’s thoughts to be relevant and meaningful in the current situation. Here, I describe our approach to understanding and modeling cognitive priming, and show how it can explain human behavior on several tasks, including two experiments involving similarity judgments, and one involving retrieval-induced forgetting. These results provide evidence for our theory of priming, provide further evidence for the prevalence of priming in human cognition, and relate these different cognitive tasks to one another in a meaningful and interesting way.