The affective meanings of automatic social behaviors: three mechanisms that explain priming

The priming of concepts has been shown to influence peoples' subsequent actions, often unconsciously. We propose 3 mechanisms (psychological, cultural, and biological) as a unified explanation of such effects. (a) Primed concepts influence holistic representations of situations by parallel constraint satisfaction. (b) The constraints among representations stem from culturally shared affective meanings of concepts acquired in socialization. (c) Patterns of activity in neural populations act as semantic pointers linking symbolic concepts to underlying emotional and sensorimotor representations and thereby causing action. We present 2 computational models of behavioral priming that implement the proposed mechanisms. One is a localist neural network that connects primes with behaviors through central nodes simulating affective meanings. In a series of simulations, where the input is based on empirical data, we show that this model can explain a wide variety of experimental findings related to automatic social behavior. The second, neurocomputational model simulates spiking patterns in populations of biologically realistic neurons. We use this model to demonstrate how the proposed mechanisms can be implemented in the brain. Finally, we discuss how our models integrate previous theoretical accounts of priming phenomena. We also examine the interactions of psychological, cultural, and biological mechanisms in the control of automatic social behavior.