Essay On Declarative Memory

Declarative memory (“knowing what”) is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled as declared. It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved, although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Declarative memory can be further sub-divided into episodic memory and semantic memory. These memory is easy to form and easily forgotten.

Procedural memory (“knowing how”) is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, particularly the use of objects or movements of the body, such as tying a shoelace, playing a guitar or riding a bike. These memories are typically acquired through repetition and practice, and are composed

Thus, it should be possible to distinguish declarative and non-declarative memory systems not only in terms of anatomy, but also in terms of operating characteristics, the kind of information processed, and the purpose served by each system. Studies of experimental animals have suggested that declarative memory is more flexible than non-declarative memory. To explore this issue in humans, we asked how well subjects who had learned the probabilistic classification task could use their task knowledge in a flexible way. Although amnesic patients and control subjects learned the classification task to the same level of proficiency, the two groups differed in their performance on transfer tests that asked for judgments about the associative strengths of the test cues. Amnesic patients performed more poorly than control subjects on the transfer tests. Importantly, they were impaired on the same test questions that were indicated by independent raters to be the most indirect and to require the most flexible use of task knowledge. These findings show that declarative and non-declarative memory differs with respect to the flexibility of the knowledge acquired by each system. Declarative knowledge is accessible to multiple response systems. Non-declarative memory is more encapsulated and has less access to systems not involved in the initial