Declarative and Procedural Memory

Declarative memory covers all the information we hold about facts, names, and dates — knowing that a rickshaw has three wheels, that India became independent on 15 August 1947, that a frog is an amphibian, or that a friend happens to share our own name. What makes this information 'declarative' is precisely that it is amenable to verbal description: we can state it out loud, in words, whenever it is needed.

Procedural memory, by contrast, holds our memory for the procedures behind various tasks and skills — knowing how to ride a bicycle, how to make tea, or how to play basketball. Unlike declarative memory, the contents of procedural memory are not easily put into words. A person can readily describe, step by step, how a game of cricket is played, because that description draws on declarative memory about the rules; but the same person may find it genuinely difficult to put into words exactly how they balance and pedal a bicycle, because that ability is stored procedurally, as a skill, rather than as a verbal fac …