Abstract: Two experiments were conducted to examine the priming effect of the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) and the left cerebral hemisphere (LH) by using English words, Chinese characters and pictures as experimental material.Subjects received fragment completion & identification test. Results of the two experiments indicated that: if the size and form of the Chinese characters were the same, the visual priming of RH was larger than that of LH. In contrast, neither English words nor the pictures’priming fo RH was large than that of LH. These data suggested that at least there was a separate system encoding the visual representations of Chinese characters that produced priming. The system that was more effective in RH was better at the representation of form- specific information. For the representation of abstract-form information of Chinese characters, the difference between RH and LH was not significant. The fragment completion & identification test of Chinese characters was capable of measuring visual perceptual representation and it was a perceptual (or data-driven) implicit memory test.

Key words: implicit memory, Perceptual representation, priming effect, words