Abstract: When the subjects are asked to recognize a picture,the performance is impaired by previous display of a degraded one of it.This phenomenon is called part-set cuing effect.In the present research,the conditions on which this effect occured were investigated.In Experiment Ⅰ,the results showed that by displaying more than one step of the degraded ones of the same picture,the recognition of this picture was more likely to be impaired.In Experiment Ⅱ, if the subjects had studied the Chinese characters beforehand,the part-set cuing effect occured only if the Chinese characters in a group were similar in shape, and an opposite effect was encountered on the other two condition:the Chinese characters in a group were similar in meaning or were selected randomly,while they were dissimilar in shape. If the subjects had not studied these Chinese characters beforehand,the effect occured in the shape-similar group and the randomly-selected group.A reasonable explanation to these results were given out in this research.

Key words: part-set cuing effect, activation, non-memory task, priming