Priming

Priming refers to the influence of a prior (prime) context on the processing of a subsequently presented target event. The contextual information allows perceivers to develop expectations for future upcoming events by expecting most strongly the events that are the most probable to occur in this context.

The processing of an expected event is then facilitated, that is, it is more accurate and faster (and less neural resources are required) than the processing of an unexpected or less-expected event. Expectations are part of cognitive functions in general; they shape people's interaction with the environment and, depending on their nature, facilitate or delay the processing of events. Because of the temporal nature of sound, expectations take a central position in music perception: which sounds are most probable to come next, and at what moment should they occur. Musical expectations not only influence efficiency of processing, but also have a role in musical expressivity and emotion.

The phenomenon of priming has been studied with the “priming paradigm.” The priming paradigm is an implicit investigation method that allows studying perceivers' expectations and their influence on the efficiency of perception. It gives information about perceivers' knowledge about structural relations between events and perceivers' sensitivity to the context dependency of events (i.e., a same event can be expected or unexpected, depending on the prior context). In music, a same tone (or chord) can take different musical functions, depending on the currently instilled key in the musical piece (i.e., context). Consequently, a same tone (or chord) can adequately function as the final tonic tone (or chord) in one key, but not in another key (thus taking another function, either in-key as subdominant, or out-of-key). When listening to a musical piece, tonally enculturated listeners (i.e., listeners who have acquired implicit knowledge about the musical structures and functions of the tonal system of their culture) develop expectations about future musical events, depending on the beginning of the musical piece.