What Is Implicit Memory and How It Shapes Our Unconscious Decisions

Implicit Memory

When we contemplate what drives our various decisions, we might think it's due to theory or some other reason. However, in doing so, our attribution remains limited to the realm of our consciousness.

Consciousness refers to what we can think of, know, or become aware of. Yet there are things that truly exist but remain unnoticed, which we call the subconscious. In long‑term memory, explicit memory corresponds to consciousness, while implicit memory corresponds to the subconscious; the former is recallable or recognizable, the latter is not consciously accessible.

For example, a patient under anesthesia hears Shakespeare’s sonnet. After waking, he insists he remembers nothing, yet psychological testing reveals he has acquired knowledge of the poem, demonstrating implicit memory.

Such cases are common in daily life: after experiencing an event or hearing something, a person’s later decisions are influenced by that prior information, yet when asked to explain the reason, they do not mention it—not because they lie, but because they are unaware of its impact; their decisions appear to rely on explicit memory, while many of their tendencies actually stem from implicit memory.

We receive far more information than we are aware of, and our decisions are ultimately determined by that information rather than by so‑called “intuition” or “sixth sense”.