ABSTRACT
The characterization of the amnesic syndrome has played a central role in the development of the concepts of implicit and explicit memory. In particular, it has been proposed that brain damage associated with anterograde amnesia affects explicit memory while leaving implicit memory preserved. Recent findings tot amnesic recognition is relatively preserved when compared with amnesic recall bear on this characterization of amnesia. The relatively preserved recognition could be a result of amnesics' putatively intact implicit memory. However, several experiments show that preserved recognition can occur in the absence of any priming, suggesting that it may be independent of implicit memory. Instead, the evidence indicates that amnesics can form explicit memories, albeit with an impoverished representation that makes recall difficult while leaving recognition relatively preserved. The Coherence Model attempts to capture the nature of this representation by positing that amnesics encode events, but not the connections between them. The possibility of altering the distinction between implicit and explicit memory to one between the encoding of contents of events and the connections among events is explored.
