The subjective experiences of recollection and familiarity have featured prominently in the search for neurocognitive mechanisms of memory. However, these two explicit expressions of memory, which involve conscious awareness of memory retrieval, are distinct from an entire category of implicit expressions of memory that do not entail such awareness. This review summarizes recent evidence showin...

Recognition confidence and the explicit awareness of memory retrieval commonly accompany accurate responding in recognition tests. Memory performance in recognition tests is widely assumed to measure explicit memory, but the generality of this assumption is questionable. Indeed, whether recognition in nonhumans is always supported by explicit memory is highly controversial. Here we identified c...

During episodic recognition tests, meaningful stimuli such as words can engender both conscious retrieval (explicit memory) and facilitated access to meaning that is distinct from the awareness of remembering (conceptual implicit memory). Neuroimaging investigations of one type of memory are frequently subject to the confounding influence of the other type of memory, thus posing a serious imped...

We used event-related functional MRI to study awareness of prior episodes during memory retrieval and its relationship to the intention to retrieve memories. Participants completed cues with words from a prior list (intentional test) or with the first words that came to mind (incidental test). During both tests, explicit memory was separated from priming in the absence of explicit memory. Primi...

Dissociations between implicit and explicit memory have featured prominently in theories of human memory. However, similarities between the two forms of memory have been less studied. One open question concerns whether implicit and explicit memory share encoding resources. To explore this question, we employed a subsequent memory design in which several novel scenes were repeated once during an...