Ambiguous Figure Priming Effect

Ambiguous figures consist of two perceivable images in one image. For example, you may see a woman looking into a vanity or a skull. For ambiguous figures, what a viewer perceives depends on the context and the features presented, which includes top-down and bottom-up processes (Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Kersten et. al, 2004). Perception of such ambiguous figures can be affected through priming, where exposure to one stimulus leads to a response to another stimulus (Ballets & Dale, 2007; Bugelski & Alampay, 1961; Goolkasian & Woodberry, 2010). Priming effects can be seen outside ambiguous figures. For example, priming via environment, wet or dry, leads to participants recalling words better when learning and recall occurred in the same environment …show more content…
Carmichael (1932) found that showing objects during a learning phase in addition to pairing the objects with a specific word lead to participants redrawing an object in regards to the paired word. Ballets and Dale (2007) found that reading a passage related to one way an ambiguous figure can be perceived resulted in the participants perceiving the ambiguous figure depicted by the passage. Bugelski and Alampay (1961) demonstrated the ability of seeing a biased image (one catered to perceiving an ambiguous figure one way versus another) before visually experiencing the related ambiguous figure resulted in perceiving the ambiguous figure based on the initial biased image. However, Goolkasian and Woodberry (2010) found that exposing participants to a loosely associated prime (either image of object or object name) results in a priming effect, but only if a semantic relationship was established between the prime and the ambiguous image. There is no past research on whether or not priming through imagination has the ability to see the ambiguous figure one way versus another. Therefore, we explored whether priming via imagining an image results in perceiving an ambiguous figure one way versus