Semantic Priming in Word Clouds

Keywords

word clouds, semantic priming, text perception

Abstract

While word clouds pack a lot of data into a relatively small area, it is unclear whether readers actually benefit from all of that information, or if they are only processing a few of the words shown. We sought to determine if words outside of a reader's central vision were contributing to their interpretation by leveraging the semantic priming effect: a phenomenon in which participants will more quickly recognize a word if they have been recently primed with a word that is semantically related. We presented participants with word clouds containing related and unrelated words to see whether they might prime this lexical decision task more strongly than single words alone. We showed that the peripheral contents of a cloud do affect participant performance at this task, though more work is needed to understand the impacts of these differences in real-world settings.