Date of Submission

Fall 2023

Academic Program

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Justin Dainer-Best

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Memory is an essential skill for survival but also very complicated. Semantic memory is an aspect of long-term memory that consists of words and facts about the world. This study aims to see if there is a relationship between semantic priming and semantic search. There were 57 participants with full data who took both the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and a primed lexical decision task (LDT). The RAT tests for semantic search abilities and the primed LDT tests semantic priming ability. It is hypothesized that participants who get faster reaction times (RTs) on correct trials of the RAT will have faster RTs on correct trials of the primed LDT. It is also hypothesized that there will be a correlation between number of correct trials on the RAT and number of correct trials on the RAT per participant. If these data are related, this may indicate that semantic search and semantic priming may be controlled by the same mechanism. It was found that there is a positive correlation between number of correct trials on the RAT and primed LDT. However, there was no relationship found between the RTs on correct trials of the RAT compared to RTs on correct trials of the primed LDT. This indicates that there is some support for semantic search and semantic priming sharing the same mechanism, but not strong support. Perhaps the underlying processes somewhat overlap between semantic search and semantic priming. Future research could look into this relationship more precisely, such as with brain imaging, and potentially find out the mechanism behind semantic priming and semantic search.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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