Memory: Performance, knowledge, and experience

Abstract

The relation between three aspects of memory—behaviour, knowledge, and conscious experience—is discussed. Memory research of the past has tended to concentrate on memory performance, and to neglect memory as conscious experience. This neglect may reflect the acceptance of a tacit assumption that behaviour, knowledge, and experience are closely correlated, an assumption designated here as the doctrine of concordance. Some recent research, explicitly concerned with conscious experience in remembering, has thrown doubt on concordance as a general rule. Four examples of this research are briefly reviewed: repetition priming, source amnesia, remembering vs knowing, and neural correlates of episodic and semantic memory as revealed by regional cerebral blood flow. This research suggests that there is no general correlation between memory performance, retrieved knowledge, and conscious recollective experience, and that these relations in different situations must be discovered rather than just postulated under the aegis of some tacitly accepted doctrine.