Memory Skill: The Proceduralization of Declarative Memory Through Retrieval Practice

Two outstanding achievements of experimental memory research over the past fifty years have been the description of multiple memory systems and the demonstration that recall is the most effective form of long-term learning. The most important contribution of the former was to show that so-called declarative forms of memory can be described with different psychological characteristics and neurological background mechanisms than procedural memory, which plays a fundamental role in skill learning. Perhaps the most successful research trend in recent years has pointed out that memory recall, a declarative test, fundamentally changes memory representation and its long-term accessibility. In this chapter, we try to combine these two research fields and we aim to present the results of behavioral and brain research that support the assumption that declarative recall causes changes in retrieved memory content that are best understood within the mechanisms of the procedural memory system.