Indirect tests of memory

About: Indirect tests of memory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 351 publications have been published within this topic receiving 40232 citations.

Implicit memory: History and current status.

Abstract: Memory for a recent event can be expressed explicitly, as conscious recollection, or implicitly, as a facilitation of test performance without conscious recollection. A growing number of recent studies have been concerned with implicit memory and its relation to explicit memory. This article presents an historical survey of observations concerning implicit memory, reviews the findings of contemporary experimental research, and delineates the strengths and weaknesses of alternative theoretical accounts of implicit memory. It is argued that dissociations between implicit and explicit memory have been documented across numerous tasks and subject populations, represent an important challenge for research and theory, and should be viewed in the context of other dissociations between implicit and explicit expressions of knowledge that have been documented in recent cognitive and neuropsychological research. Psychological studies of memory have traditionally relied on tests such as free recall, cued recall, and recognition. A prominent feature of these tests is that they make explicit reference to, and require conscious recollection of, a specific learning episode. During the past several years, however, increasing attention has been paid to experimental situations in which information that was encoded during a particular episode is subsequently expressed without conscious or deliberate recollection. Instead of being asked to try to remember recently presented information, subjects are simply required to perform a task, such as completing a graphemic fragment of a word, indicating

How many memory systems are there

Abstract: Memory is made up of a number of interrelated systems, organized structures of operating components consisting of neural substrates and their behavioral and cognitive correlates. A ternary clas- sificatory scheme of memory is proposed in which procedural, semantic, and episodic memory constitute a "monohierarchical" arrangement: Episodic memory is a specialized subsystem of semantic memory, and semantic memory is a specialized subsystem of procedural memory. The three memory systems differ from one another in a number of ways, including the kind of consciousness that characterizes their operations. The ternary scheme overlaps with di- chotomies and trichotomies of memory proposed by others. Evidence for multiple systems is derived from many sources. Illustrative data are provided by ex- periments in which direct priming effects are found to be both functionally and stochastically independent of recognition memory. Solving puzzles in science has much in common with solving puzzles for amusement, but the two differ in important respects. Consider, for instance, the jigsaw puzzle that scientific activity frequently imitates. The everyday version of the puzzle is determinate: It consists of a target picture and jigsaw pieces that, when properly assembled, are guaranteed to match the picture. Scientific puzzles are indeter- minate: The number of pieces required to complete a picture is unpredictable; a particular piece may fit many pictures or none; it may fit only one picture, but the picture itself may be unknown; or the hypothetical picture may be imagined, but its com- ponent pieces may remain undiscovered. This article is about a current puzzle in the science of memory. It entails an imaginary picture and a search for pieces that fit it. The picture, or the hypothesis, depicts memory as consisting of a number of systems, each system serving somewhat different purposes and operating according to some- what different principles. Together they form the marvelous capacity that we call by the single name of memory, the capacity that permits organisms to benefit from their past experiences. Such a picture is at variance with conventional wisdom that holds memory to be essentially a single system, the idea that "memory is memory." The article consists of three main sections. In the first, 1 present some pretheoretical reasons for hypothesizing the existence of multiple memory systems and briefly discuss the concept of memory system. In the second, I describe a ternary classifi- catory scheme of memory--consisting of procedural, semantic, and episodic memory--and briefly com- pare this scheme with those proposed by others. In the third, I discuss the nature and logic of evidence for multiple systems and describe some experiments that have yielded data revealing independent effects of one and the same act of learning, effects seemingly at variance with the idea of a single system. I answer the question posed in the title of the article in the short concluding section.

Implicit and explicit memory for new associations in normal and amnesic subjects.

Abstract: Two experiments examined whether repetition priming effects on a word completion task are influenced by new associations between unrelated word pairs that were established during a single study trial. On the word completion task, subjects were presented with the initial three letters of the response words from the study list pairs and they completed these fragments with the first words that came to mind. The fragments were shown either with the paired words from the study list (same context) or with other words (different context). Both experiments showed a larger priming effect in the same-context condition than in the different-context condition, but only with a study task that required elaborative processing of the word pairs. This effect was observed with college students and amnesic patients, suggesting that word completion performance is mediated by implicit memory for new associations that is independent of explicit recollection.

Implicit memory: Retention without remembering.

Abstract: Explicit measures of human memory, such as recall or recognition, reflect conscious recollection of the past. Implicit tests of retention measure transfer (or priming) from past experience on tasks that do not require conscious recollection of recent experiences for their performance. The article reviews research on the relation between explicit and implicit memory. The evidence points to substantial differences between standard explicit and implicit tests, because many variables create dissociations between these tests. For example, although pictures are remembered better than words on explicit tests, words produce more priming than do pictures on several implicit tests. These dissociations may implicate different memory systems that subserve distinct memorial functions, but the present argument is that many dissociations can be understood by appealing to general principles that apply to both explicit and implicit tests. Phenomena studied under the rubric of implicit memory may have important implications in many other fields, including social cognition, problem solving, and cognitive development.