Glossary
Explicit memory (declarative memory)
What is Explicit Memory?
Explicit memory involves consciously recalling or recognizing facts and events. Often called declarative memory, it includes what you know and experiences you can remember. Its content can be verbal or nonverbal.
Types and examples of explicit memory
Semantic memory concerns general knowledge that is not tied to one remembered episode. Knowing what a word means, that Paris is the capital of France, or how multiplication works are semantic memories.
Episodic memory concerns personally experienced events and their context. Remembering your first day at a job, where a conversation happened, or how a particular celebration felt are episodic memories.
Both are forms of declarative memory. The distinction is useful, but an everyday memory can draw on both: telling a story about a trip can combine a specific episode with general knowledge about the place.
How does explicit memory work?
The hippocampus and related medial temporal structures help form many new declarative memories. Long-term representations involve distributed cortical systems. After learning, consolidation stabilizes and reorganizes memories. It is more than moving information from a short-term box into a long-term one.
How is it measured?
Recall tests ask people to produce information, either freely or with cues. Recognition tests ask whether something was encountered before. Attention, instructions and decision processes can all affect performance, so different tests reveal different aspects of memory.
Explicit vs. implicit memory
Nondeclarative memory is the broader umbrella for forms of learning expressed through performance without requiring conscious recollection. It includes skills, habits, priming, and conditioning. Procedural memory is part of this category, not another name for the whole category. Everyday tasks can draw on several systems at once: you can consciously remember where you learned to ride a bicycle while using learned riding skills without recalling each movement.
H.M. and other amnesia cases helped establish these distinctions. H.M. had severe difficulty forming new declarative memories after surgery, but did not lose every form of explicit knowledge.
Why it matters
Remembering a name, learning a concept and describing an event all draw on explicit memory. A memory can be vivid yet incomplete or inaccurate. In learning, clinical assessment and eyewitness accounts, the important question is what the person remembers and how that memory was tested.