WHAT IS THE DEPENDENT AND INDEPENDENT VARIABLE?

In semantic priming, being shown certain words (e.g., nurse) will make participants react faster to seeing related words (e.g., needle), but not to unrelated words (e.g., spoon).This is because those concepts are associatively linked together in our semantic network, which is how knowledge is organized in memory. When we hear the word "nurse", this activates the idea of nurse in our semantic network, and through spreading activation, this also activates related nodes (such as needle, doctor, hospital, etc.), but would not activate unassociated concepts (such as spoon, basketball, etc.)

In this particular version of the task (a variant of the Lexical Decision task), participants were presented with several pairs of words. Some participants were shown associated words (e.g., doctor-nurse; coded as a 1); some participants were shown unassociated words (e.g., tree-butter; coded as a 2); and some participants received only single words (e.g., XXXX-garage; coded as a 3). Each participant received only one of the trial types (and had 20 trials of that trial type). (NOTE: Normally this is conducted as a within-subjects design, but has been modified for this example). Participants were asked to decide whether the 2^nd word was a living organism or not. They were asked to be as accurate as possible (and incorrect trials were repeated later in the session), and reaction time was measured in milliseconds.

Presumably, semantic priming would predict that we would recognize the single words and the unassociated words equally as quickly, because there is no benefit from the first word; however, we should recognize the associated words the fastest, because of the benefit of semantic priming.