DISSOCIATIONS IN INFANT MEMORY - RETHINKING THE DEVELOPMENT OF IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY

Extending the Jacksonian principle of the hierarchical development and dissolution of function to the development and dissolution of memory researchers have concluded that implicit (procedural) memory is a prim itive system, functional shortly after birth, that processes informati on automatically, whereas explicit (declarative) memory matures late i n the 1st year and mediates the conscious recollection of a prior even t. Support for a developmental hierarchy has only been inferred from t he memory performance of adults with amnesia on priming and recognitio n-recall tests in response to manipulations of different independent v ariables. This article reviews evidence that very young infants exhibi t memory dissociations like those exhibited by adults with normal memo ry on analogous memory tests in response to manipulations of the same independent variables. These data demonstrate that implicit and explic it memory follow the same developmental timetable and challenge the ut ility of conscious recollection as the defining characteristic of expl icit memory.