Where does priming collide?

Priming is a change in how quickly or accurately a stimulus is processed because of a recent encounter with a related one. Meyer and Schvaneveldt showed in 1971 that people judge a string like nurse to be a word faster when it follows doctor, evidence that reading the first word had already readied the second. Tulving and Schacter later treated repetition priming as the signature of a distinct, implicit memory system, one that works without any deliberate act of remembering. The referent is a within-person change in processing, counted in milliseconds, and it says nothing about money or molecules.[1][2]

Unit

A within-person change in the speed or accuracy of processing a stimulus

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Reaction-time facilitation in lexical-decision or naming tasks, and savings on implicit memory tests

In economics, priming is short for pump priming, the idea that a modest injection of government spending can restart a stalled economy by lifting demand enough to get private activity flowing again. The image is a hand pump that needs a little water poured in before it will draw its own. Keynes set out the underlying case in 1936: when private spending falls short, public spending can raise total demand, and each dollar spent may add more than a dollar to output as it circulates. Here the thing primed is an economy and the unit is a flow of money, not a memory trace or a strand of DNA.[3]

Unit

An injection of public spending into an economy

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Change in aggregate demand or output relative to the fiscal injection, read through the spending multiplier

A primer is a short strand of nucleic acid that binds to a template and gives a DNA polymerase the free 3' end it needs to begin building a new strand. Without one the enzyme has nothing to extend, so the primer is what starts synthesis rather than what speeds or funds anything. Saiki and colleagues built the polymerase chain reaction in 1988 around a pair of such primers, which mark where copying begins and let a heat-stable polymerase amplify a chosen stretch of DNA. The referent is a physical molecule and the unit is a length of nucleotides, a different kind of thing from the psychological and economic meanings of the word.[4]

Unit

A short oligonucleotide that initiates polymerase extension

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Presence and length of newly synthesised or amplified DNA produced from the primed template

In soil science, priming refers to fresh organic inputs speeding up or slowing down the decomposition of soil's existing organic matter. This meaning comes from Kuzyakov (2000) in Soil Biology and Biochemistry.[5]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by