Procedural and Motor Learning, to appear in Oxford Handbook of Human Memory

Procedural memory is a form of implicit memory whereby we may learn skills through practice without conscious awareness of what has been learned. While declarative memory is often described as “knowing that”, procedural memory is considered “knowing how”. For example, it may be hard for a pianist to verbally explicate what she does when she plays a passage but she could easily demonstrate it. While motor skill learning is the most representative example of procedural memory, perceptual and cognitive skills can also be learned through practice without awareness of what has been learned. Procedural memory is tested in the lab using tasks such as the pursuit rotor task, the serial reaction time task, and various probabilistic classification tasks. Studying clinical populations, like patients with diseases of the basal ganglia, can inform our understanding of the neural substrates of procedural memory. Patients with Parkinson’s Disease and Huntington’s Disease are impaired on procedural memory tasks but show intact performance on declarative memory tasks. The opposite is true for patients with Alzheimer’s and those who have sustained a traumatic brain injury. Patients with psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Gilles de la Tourette syndrome also show deficits in procedural learning. Research with different clinical populations has deepened our understanding of the neural correlates of procedural memory and points to the basal ganglia and the cerebellum as key regions. Future research should consider the role of procedural memory in childhood development, as developmental disorders likely involve procedural learning systems.