Implicit memory
Implicit memory is a type of long-term memory that operates unconsciously and without intentional effort. Unlike explicit memory, which involves conscious recall of information or experiences, implicit memory encompasses skills and tasks performed automatically, such as riding a bike, as well as emotional responses conditioned by past experiences. This form of memory is often nonverbal, making it difficult to articulate or describe in words. The concept of implicit memory has evolved through historical philosophical and psychological perspectives, with early thinkers like William McDougall distinguishing it from explicit memory in the early 20th century.
Research has shown that implicit memory influences decision-making and behaviors, often without individuals being aware of its effects. Furthermore, while implicit and explicit memory can function independently, the relationship between the two types—whether they stem from a single memory system or multiple systems—remains a topic of ongoing investigation. Understanding implicit memory offers insight into how we learn skills and process emotional experiences, highlighting the complexity of human cognition and behavior.
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Subject Terms
Implicit memory
Implicit memory is a form of long-term memory that is unintentional, effortless, and unconscious. This information is also nondeclarative, meaning that it is hard to express in words. Implicit memory includes procedural memory—the ability to perform tasks like riding a bike without consciously thinking about them or remembering the experience of learning how to carry them out—and emotional memory—the memory of a specific feeling or sensation and conditioned emotional responses that seem to occur automatically, without conscious effort. 
The study of implicit memory is the study of how individuals learn skills, pick up information and procedural knowledge, and are emotionally conditioned without even being aware of it. It is also the study of how past experiences condition memory and how such unconscious conditioning influences decisions, judgments, and behaviors.
Overview
In his 1924 book Outline of Psychology, experimental psychologist William McDougall became the first researcher to use the words implicit and explicit to describe different expressions of memory. According to McDougall, implicit recognition involves a behavioral change that can be attributed to a recent event without conscious recollection of it or explicit reference to it, while explicit recognition involves the conscious, intentional recollection of a past event.
McDougall’s delineation of implicit and explicit memory followed centuries of thinking about unconscious memory and its impact on human behavior. The idea that a traumatic incident experienced during childhood can remain in one’s mind for a long time without conscious memory of it dates back to Descartes’s 1649 The Passions of the Soul. In 1704, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote about ideas and perceptions that people had without ever being aware of having them, though most philosophers in the eighteenth century did not share Liebniz’s view.
French philosopher Maine de Biran published The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking in 1804. While others had thought that studying habitual behavior was crucial to understanding human thinking and behavior, Maine de Biran was the first to postulate that with enough repetition, a habit could be performed automatically without conscious awareness of the act or the memory of learning it. Maine de Biran also defined and discussed three types of memory—mechanical, sensitive, and representative—of which the latter two are driven by habit and are mostly unconscious. Maine de Biran’s outline is the first clear proposal of a multiple memory system interpretation of differences between explicit and implicit memory.
From the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, thinkers in the fields of neurology, psychiatry, philosophy, experimental psychology, and others developed theories and empirical analyses of implicit memory phenomena. In the late 1800s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first researcher to conduct an experimental investigation of human memory. Ebbinghaus theorized that the act of memorizing a list of nonsense syllables that had no prior associations in the mind would involve the creation of new associations, which could then be strengthened through repetition. Ebbinghaus tested his theory on himself, memorizing a list of twenty items by repeating them over and over out loud and then after a number of repetitions, trying to recall the items. He also experimented to see what would happen when he tried to rememorize the list after an interval. In doing so, he found that he required fewer repetitions in order to rememorize the list. Ebbinghaus called this phenomenon “savings” and thought that it revealed the existence of information that he could not consciously recall.
Though researchers have found that implicit and explicit memory can operate independently of one another in certain circumstances, they have yet to determine whether the two forms of long-term memory rely on a single underlying system or on multiple systems.
Bibliography
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