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Wilson Felipe Marin

M. Eldon Barnes

PSY 1010

16 March 2021

Implicit Memory and Explicit Memory: A Parallel Job

Our behavior is determined by what we remember either consciously or

unconsciously. This means that people can change drastically by past experiences even when

in reality people don’t even remember those experiences. The two sources of memory or

what we call a conscious or unconscious memory is also known as explicit memory and

implicit memory respectively.

Explicit memory, also known as declarative memory, are memories from personal

experiences and information that are consciously retrieved by past experiences. There are

four different types of explicit memories; semantic memory, which is a part of the long-term

memory where information about the world is stored. For example, meaning of words, and

general knowledge; episodic memory is responsible to gather and store past experiences from

our personal history; spatial memory gathers and stores crucial information of cognitive maps

and individual’s spatial arrangement. About the brain structure regarding this memory, the

prefrontal cortex, which stores and retrieves long-term memories involving information and

facts, communicates to the amygdala, which is engaged in emotional learning, and the

hippocampus, which function is relayed on retaining and recalling events.

On the other hand, implicit memory, also known as unconscious memory or automatic

memory, are memories from personal experiences and information that are unconsciously

retrieved by past experiences, and it impacts our current behavior. Types of implicit memory

are; procedural memory, which is responsible for knowing how to perform particular types of

actions, and it is automatically retrieved for the execution of procedures involved in both
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cognitive and motor skills, such as reading, tying shoes or driving a car; another type of

implicit memory is priming, which is an unconscious form of memory concerned with

perceptual identification of words and objects. Implicit memory does not involve conscious

thought when using skills, like when we do some things with little or no awareness of the

skills involved. The functioning of implicit memory is involved in the cerebellum, which is

essential for procedural memories is located at the base of the brain, and the basal ganglia.

The cerebellum, which is primarily responsible for skill development as well as a few

cognitive tasks, receives and coordinates signals from the spinal cord, the brain and sensory

systems to carry out motor movements.

Some scientists and researchers have said that there is an impact of implicit memory’s

priming on explicit memory’s fact recalling, however, implicit and explicit memory systems

work independently and have distinct rules of operation. For example, the study of patients

with amnesia shows a separation of implicit and explicit memory. Some patients with

severely explicit memory issues did not show any challenge when it came to mastering a

certain puzzle even though they could not recall having seen the same puzzle before, this

means an expression of implicit memory.

A damage in the hippocampus shows problems with explicit memory, but the loss of this

memory seems to have still left intact in the implicit memory. Notwithstanding this apparent

separation of memory, both implicit memory and explicit memory have a job in common

when it comes to shape our behavior. Whether the two memory systems are working or

competing with each other remains to be further studied.