ABSTRACT
It’s like riding a bike: once you’ve learned it, you’ll never forget how to do it.
Although it is uncertain whether this adage has been tested empirically, personal experience of the authors suggests that the passage of many years is indeed insufficient to destroy bike-riding ability. Recently, skills such as bikeriding have been termed implicit memory, and their retention has been contrasted with what is seen with explicit memory tasks, in which participants are aware that they are making a memory decision, as occurs when answering the question, “Who taught you to ride a bike?” Implicit memory has been described as encompassing various tasks, including not only acquisition of motor skill, but also priming (as when something comes quickly and easily to mind because it has been encountered previously) and classical conditioning. (For a typical graphic depiction of these distinctions, see Squire & Zola, 1996.) There has been considerable interest in typologies of this kind as supporting investigations of the architecture of human memory that are informed by combinations of evidence from behavior and neuroscience, and that encompass research with a variety of human and non-human populations.
