Implicit Memory in Amnesic Patients
The strongest evidence that suggests a separation of implicit and explicit memory focuses on studies of amnesic patients. As was previously discussed in the section on procedural memory, amnesic patients showed unimpaired ability to learn tasks and procedures that do not rely on explicit memory. In one study, amnesic patients showed a severely impaired ability in verbal long-term memory, but no impairment in their memory for learning how to solve a certain motor task called a pursuit rotor. Patients showed this improvement over time even while claiming on each occasion to have never seen the puzzle before. This result indicates that the mechanism which allows for long-term declarative memory does not have a similar effect on implicit memory. Furthermore, studies on priming in amnesic patients also reveal the possibility of an intact implicit memory despite a severely impaired explicit memory. For example, amnesic patients and a control group showed similar improvements in word completion as a result of priming, even if they had no memory of being involved in a previous test. That priming occurs without the involvement of explicit memory again suggests that the two types of memory have different functions in the brain.
Read more about this topic: Implicit Memory, Evidence For The Separation of Implicit and Explicit Memory
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