Furthermore, amnesic patients frequently show "implicit" memory for experiences even in the absence of conscious knowledge.
Studies in the 1970s, divided and moved towards two areas of work, one focusing on animal studies and the other to amnesic patients.
Increased work with amnesic patients lead to the finding that they were able to retain and learn tasks other than motor skills.
Further studies with amnesic patients found a larger domain of normally functioning memory for skill abilities.
However, amnesic patients are usually the exception to developing memory, but are still capable of undergoing priming, to some extent.
Recently, interest has been directed towards studying these differences, most notably by studying amnesic patients and the effect of priming.
The strongest evidence that suggests a separation of implicit and explicit memory focuses on studies of amnesic patients.
Besides the study of amnesic patients, other evidence also indicates a separation between implicit and explicit memory.
This showed that amnesic patients can learn new semantic information, although slower than normal test subjects.
Evidence from amnesic patients have shown that lesions in the right frontal lobe are a direct cause of false recognition errors.