MEMORY FOR ITEMS AND MEMORY FOR RELATIONS IN THE PROCEDURAL DECLARATIVE MEMORY FRAMEWORK/

A major area of research in memory and amnesia concerns the item speci ficity of implicit memory. In this paper we address several issues abo ut the nature of implicit memory phenomena and about what constitutes an ''item'', using the procedural/declarative memory theory to guide u s. We consider the nature of memory for items and of memory for relati ons among items, within the context of the procedural/declarative fram ework, providing us with the foundation necessary to analyse the basis for item-specific implicit memory phenomena. We review recent work fr om our laboratories demonstrating the fundamentally relational and fle xible nature of declarative memory representation, in both humans and animals, and the essential role of the hippocampal system in relationa l memory processing. We show, further, that the memory representations supporting implicit memory phenomena are inflexible and nonrelational , and are tied to specific processing modules. Finally, we introduce e mpirical approaches that blur the distinction between skill learning a nd repetition priming, and show computational modelling results that d emonstrate how these two implicit memory phenomena can be mediated by a single incremental learning mechanism, in accord with the claims of the procedural-declarative theory. Taken together, these various analy ses of memory for items and memory for relations help to illuminate th e nature of the functional deficit in amnesia and the memory systems o f the brain.