another major advance in our understanding of memory was the discovery that priming is not restricted to concepts and words. you cannot know this from conscious experience, of course, but you must accept the alien idea that your actions and your emotions can be primed by events of which you are not even aware. in an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John and his collaborators asked students at New university - most aged eighteen to twenty-two - to assemble four word sentences from a set of five words. for one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. when they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. that short walk was what the experiment was about. the researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. as bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.
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