Association and the Mechanisms of Priming Mike Dacey Bates College, Department of Philosophy Hedge Hall, 7 Andrews Rd., Lewiston, ME 04240, USA. mdacey@bates.edu Abstract In psychology, increasing interest in priming has brought with it a revival of associationist views. Association seems a natural explanation for priming: simple associative links carry subcritical levels of activation from representations of the prime stimulus to representations of the target stimulus. This then facilitates use of the representation of the target. I argue that the processes responsible for priming are not associative. They are more complex. Even so, associative models do get something right about how these processes behave. As a result, I argue, we should reconsider how we interpret associative models, taking them to identify regularities in the sequence of representational states in any kind of process, rather than as denoting a particular kind of process. Keywords: Psychology, Associationism, Priming, Learning, Psychological Modeling, Explanation 1. Introduction Priming has a broad reach in psychology. Between examples like semantic priming (Neely, 1977, 1991; McNamara, 2005), repetition priming (Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977), affective priming (Klauer & Musch, 2003), and social priming (Fazio & Olson, 2003; Molden, 2014), the concept plays a signifcant role in several literatures across the feld. Priming Journal of Cognitive Science 20-3:281-321, 2019 ©2019 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University