thus, attention at the time of learning may be of crucial importance to subequent conscious recollection, but is irrelevant to implicit memory. In sum,these findings confirm that the crucial distinction between explicit and implicit memory is in terms of the involvement of conscious recollection. This poses problems for researchers,because it is often hard to decide whether conscious recollection infulences any given memory performance. In spite of this,there is now convincing evidence that the distinction between explicit and implicit memory is both valid and important. Many