Which term is defined as the activation of associations in memory making related concepts more accessible and likely to influence thinking?

• A. Priming
• B. Framing
• C. Gambler's Fallacy
• D. Functional Fixedness

Answer: (A)

Priming is the activation of associations in memory that makes related concepts more accessible and more likely to influence thinking. When you’re primed, a prior cue can bias how you interpret a later stimulus or what you notice, often without conscious awareness. This happens because ideas are connected in a mental network; activating one concept spreads to related ones, lowering the threshold for those ideas to surface and affect judgments or behavior. For example, exposure to words or images related to kindness can make people more generous in a subsequent task, while related stimuli can speed recognition of related terms. The other terms refer to different phenomena: framing changes how information is presented to influence choices, the gambler’s fallacy is the mistaken belief that past events affect future odds in the short term, and functional fixedness is the tendency to see objects only in their usual uses.