ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, research exploring the relation between implicit and explicit forms of memory has generated an impressive array of new findings, theoretical perspectives, and procedures for investigating the effects of past experience on subsequent behavior (for reviews, see Graf & Masson, 1993; Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988; Roediger & McDermott, 1993; Schacter, 1987a; Schacter, Chiu, & Ochsner, 1993). Studies of implicit memory have also exposed gaps in our understanding of conscious, explicit recollection. One such gap involves the distinction between retrieving stored information, on the one hand, and the subjective experience of remembering, on the other. Logically, retrieval and remembering are not the same thing; the subjective experience of remembering, at its core, involves taking retrieved information and interpreting it as depicting or pertaining to some past experience. For years, however, the question of how retrieved information becomes a conscious memory was ignored by memory researchers, in large part because on tests of explicit memory (i.e., recall and recognition), retrieval and remembering are coextensive: By explicitly asking subjects to think back to the study phase, the experimenter is forging the link between present and past that, outside of the lab, subjects have to discover on their own (cf. Schacter & Tulving, 1982; Tulving, 1989).
