COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS (CAN) PRIME FURIOUSLY IN PRESS, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Colorless green ideas (can) prime furiously

That similar words can prime one another isn’t news. However, recently this phenomenon has been exploited to make inferences about conceptual representations. What types of similarity matter? While there is evidence that similarity in function, shape, and even manipulation figure in the organization of semantic memory, evidence for color similarity is sparse. This is surprising: intuition suggests that color is a prominent feature of many concepts. We report an experiment that clarifies this puzzle and illustrates the dynamic nature of conceptual representations. We report color priming (e.g., the word emerald primes the word cucumber) in subjects who have previously completed a color-Stroop task. Notably, the size of the Stroop effect predicts the size of the priming effect across subjects. When the order of tasks is reversed, priming is eliminated. By highlighting that extrinsic and intrinsic factors can both influence conceptual activation, these findings have implications for theories of semantic memory.