Priming is an effect of neuroanatomy and is also referred to as pathwaying. In this process, a stimulus that has already been received earlier is processed more effectively by the nervous system when it is received repeatedly. Degenerative brain diseases make priming more difficult.
What is priming?
Priming is a learning process that directly affects the nerves and neural pathways. If a particular stimulus has been processed in the past, it will be brought to cognition more quickly or effectively when processed repeatedly. Psychology and neurophysiology know this phenomenon under the term priming. Priming is often referred to as “relearning” on the basis of these connections. Priming processes predominantly involve the cortical areas of the brain. On a larger scale, priming is also referred to as pathways. Priming refers to the repeated excitation of specific neural pathways that can increase the efficiency of equally strong stimuli or make the affected pathways accessible to weaker stimuli. In this context, priming is a process of long-term potentiation and thus sometimes accounts for the learning effect of human neurons. Furthermore, priming plays a role in selective perception. This term refers to a psychological phenomenon that makes people perceive different stimuli more strongly and different ones of the predominant stimuli hardly at all in the same situation. Selective perception may be based on priming effects.
Function and task
Priming is a learning process that directly affects nerves and neural pathways. In this context, a distinction is made between temporal and spatial priming. In spatial pathway priming, a synapse is stimulated in the area of multiple, spatially distinct afferents. In temporal pathwaying, different individual stimuli arrive in rapid succession at the same afferent of a particular synapse. The totality of these stimuli elicits a postsynaptic excitatory potential after their decay. Depolarization of the nerve cell occurs with each pathway. Borrowing from this original neurophysiological concept of priming, the term has broadened to include consideration of phenomena in brain research, psychophysics, behavioral physiology, and social psychology. The original understanding of the term from neuroanatomy associates priming primarily with long-term potentiation. This temporal priming corresponds to the learning effects of neurons, which must necessarily be preceded by earlier spatial priming that occurs at multiple afferents. Within psychology, priming is attached to stimuli. Thus, a stimulus is capable of influencing the processing of a subsequent stimulus. This influence can be positive or negative and depends on which memory contents are activated by the stimulus. This type of priming corresponds to associative activation, which is relevant as a so-called context effect. In a dialogue, for example, answering a particular question may show effects on subsequent questions. For example, if the first question activates negative ratings, all subsequent questions will be negatively associated. In a similar way, priming is relevant to selective perception. Learning theory associates the term with somewhat different content. Learning theorists assume that the frequent repetition of certain information causes a priming for this memory content to take place. Each piece of information corresponds to a neuronal correlate of mental representations. The more often certain information is rehearsed with the simultaneous activation of other representations, the more likely it is that the individual representations will become permanently linked. In this way, associations to certain concepts emerge. Thus, for learning theory, pathway effects are the neurophysiological precursor of thoughts and memories. In this context, priming is partly responsible for allowing incomplete words or images to be completed by the individual.
Diseases and disorders
The priming effect plays a role in the context of certain diseases. For example, patients with Parkinson’s disease are often given L-dopa preparations in the early stages of the disease. These preparations suppress for a few hours the characteristic tremor caused by the disease. The drugs cross the blood-brain barrier and act directly on the brain.Some side effects are associated with long-term use of the medication. This is especially true of dyskinesia. This is what medicine refers to as movement disorders, especially those of the limbs. For example, a common side effect is involuntary undulation of the limbs. In most cases, these dyskinesias occur only after several years of use and subside as soon as the drug is discontinued. However, when the patient resumes L-dopa after a long break, dyskinesias that occurred in the past recur immediately. The recurrence therefore no longer takes several years when the medication is taken repeatedly, but occurs without delay. This correlation has now been linked by science to the priming effect. Apart from these connections, degenerative diseases of the brain in particular can make priming more difficult and thus impair the ability of nerve cells to learn. This is especially true for brain diseases in which cortical brain areas are damaged. For example, one sign of impaired priming due to cortical lesions is the inability to complete words. In particular, neurological diseases affecting the area of long-term potentiation are a current topic of research in medicine. In addition to Alzheimer’s disease, Crohn’s disease, for example, also has an impact on long-term potentiation. Due to the degradation of neuronal synapses, priming is no longer possible and dark areas appear in the memory of the affected person. Psychological priming can also be disturbed by various processes and cause disease. For example, for a person with a predominantly negative view of the world, priming within any situation or conversation tends to activate negative associations and in this way causes affected individuals to permanently develop more negative memories.
