A two-part demonstration of prototypicality and semantic priming: students rate how typical various birds are of the category BIRD, then complete a lexical decision task testing whether typical exemplars prime related words faster than atypical ones.
Contributed by Psychology Department
In Part 1, students rate high- and low-typicality birds (e.g., robin vs. penguin) for how good an example each is of the category BIRD. In Part 2, students complete a lexical decision task in which bird names briefly prime a related target word, letting the class compare reaction times for high-typicality related, low-typicality related, unrelated, and nonword trials. Results include prototype rating averages and cleaned reaction-time summaries by condition, with a downloadable CSV of trial-level data.
References:
Prototypicality: Rosch, E. H. (1975a). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104, 192–233.
Priming: Rosch, E. H. (1975b). The nature of mental codes for color categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 303–322.