Multiple Learning and Memory Systems

In this essay an ideational projection into the future is made in the form of a prediction that students of learning and memory will discover and verify the existence of multiple learning and memory systems. Until recently the majority of researchers have held the pretheoretical belief that a single system underlies all phenomena of learning and memory. The single-system idea is now under intensive experimental and theoretical scrutiny, and its revision seems to be imminent. This change is fueled by increasingly persuasive findings of sharp dissociations in various kinds of learning and memory performance observed in patients with organic brain damage, in experimentally lesioned animals, and in normal human subjects initial suggestions have already been made that some dichotomies and trichotomies of learning and memory that have been proposed in fact represent distinct neurobehavioral and neurocognitive systems. The discovery and verification of the existence of such postulated multiple systems will result from the collective and collaborative efforts of researchers in neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and psychology, as well as other disciplines, and will lead to the emergence of a new science of learning and memory.