Remembering without awareness.

Amnesics reveal savings in their objective performance of a task even though they are not aware of remembering. The authors review experiments that reveal a dissociation of memory and awareness for normals as well as amnesics. The episodic–semantic memory distinction has been employed by others as an account of the dissociation of memory and awareness. An account of this sort leads one to expect that remembering without awareness would be relatively context-free. In contrast, several experiments show that remembering without awareness can be specific to memory for a particular episode. (French abstract) (52 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)