Z. Dienes et R. Fahey, THE ROLE OF IMPLICIT MEMORY IN CONTROLLING A DYNAMIC SYSTEM, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 51(3), 1998, pp. 593-614
The relationship between implicit memory and implicit learning is expl
ored. Dienes and Fahey (1995) showed that learning to control a dynami
c system was mediated by a look-up table consisting of previously succ
essful responses to specific situations. The experiment reported in th
is paper showed that facilitated performance on old situations was ind
ependent of the subjects' ability to recognize those situations as old
, suggesting that memory was implicit. Further analyses of the Dienes
and Fahey data replicated this independence of control performance on
recognition. However, unlike the implicit memory revealed on fragment
completion tasks, successful performance on the dynamic control tasks
was remarkably resilient to modality shifts. The results are discussed
in terms of models of implicit learning and the nature of implicit me
mory.