ABSTRACT
Modern research on conscious and unconscious influences of memory is embodied by the distinction between explicit and implicit memory. E. Claparede's example demonstrates that researchers have long turned to amnesic patients to provide insight into memory without awareness. The distinction between conceptual and perceptual implicit memory is the most prominent distinction in the literature on implicit memory. An important impetus for research in implicit memory were surprising findings of preserved learning in patients with anterograde amnesia. Specifically, although patients with anterograde amnesia perform much worse than control subjects on explicit measures of memory, conceptual implicit tests typically produce equivalent levels of priming for the amnesic and control participants. Many commonly used implicit tests are perceptual in nature. In contrast to perceptual implicit tests, conceptual implicit tests guide memory retrieval with meaningful cues. One commonly used conceptual implicit test is category-exemplar production.
