ABSTRACT
Numerous chapters in this book document dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, dissociations that can be seen in laboratory experiments with normal subjects or investigations of patients suffering from the amnesic syndrome. How are these observations to be explained? What do they tell us about the nature of human memory? It is often argued that from such data we are learning something about the architecture of the memory system. As Roediger, Srinivas and Weldon note in their chapter, "the dominant theoretical interpretation of the dissociations between implicit and explicit tests bas been provided by the assumption that these measures tap different memory systems in the brain". Thus one finds such titles for articles and chapters on this topic as "How many memory systems are there?" (Tulving, 1985) or "Processing subsystems of memory" (Johnson and Hirst, 1989) or ''The evolution of multiple memory systems" (Sherry and Scbacter,1987).
