Definition And Compare And Contrast The Effect Of Priming And

The effect of priming and a concept of response inhibition are one of the central ones in psychology. We attempted to see how priming influences response inhibition to healthy or unhealthy food. We used primes that were either congruent or incongruent to the stimuli. Our hypothesis was that in congruent condition participants would do fewer response errors than in incongruent conditions. The hypothesis was not supported, as we did not find the subliminal prime effect on target stimuli perception. Additionally, we looked at the difference between the mean error rate in healthy and unhealthy conditions. Participants had a tendency to make fewer errors in an unhealthy food conditions. This might be because participants preferred to eat unhealthy

Our results of prime being insignificant are contradictory to the results of other experiments, for example, Draine and Greenwald (1998), where participants made more response errors in incongruent prime condition. In addition, Hughes, Velmans, & De Fockert (2009) showed that inhibition-related parts of the brain are activated during exposure to incongruent stimuli and that prime influences the error rate significantly. Our inconsistent results might be explained by the limitations our study had.

The main drawback of our study was a very small sample size. All of the participants were University students, studying the same subject and doing the same module, therefore, they were not representing a general population or even a University population. We did not ask participants about their age or gender and that might be

However, even though we used a mask before and after the prime, it might be the case that participants were able to see it and the priming was not subconscious, as in this situation the effect of priming reverses (Ortells, Vellido, Daza, & Noguera, 2006) and is similar to our results. In fact, there is no universal definition of what is meant for something to be processed unconsciously, as “awareness” does not have a universal definition and might refer to encoding or retrieval of individual stimuli or relationships between stimuli (Doyen, Klein, Simons, & Cleeremans, 2014). Moreover, measuring awareness is a controversial process (Doyen, Klein, Simons, & Cleeremans, 2014). We did not include any test to measure whether the primes were actually processed unconsciously, therefore, it might be a good idea for further research to do