Read the Abstract to get an overview of the research. A general orientation to the article and specific aspects your instructor wants you to concentrate on are presented below.

People with dissociative identity disorder (DID) almost always have some form of interpersonality amnesia -- that is, the different identities cannot access the thoughts and actions of the other identities. Sometimes the different identities are not even aware of the existence of the other identities. 

Although people with DID do not have explicit memory for the different identities, do they share implicit memories? Explicit memories are specific memories, such as where you went last night or recall for a list of study words. Implicit memories do not have any specific recollected content like explicit memories but contain information that can influence behavior without entering conscious awareness. Implicit memory is often described as memory without any awareness of the memory. 

Eich, Macaulay, Loewenstein, and Dihle (1997) studied people with DID, who did not share explicit memories between identities; they had interpersonality amnesia. Eich et al. were interested in whether this interpersonality amnesia involved both explicit and implicit memory.  As you read the report, think about (a) how using tasks taken from cognitive psychology might help us understand and diagnose DID, and (b) how studying interpersonality amnesia in DID might help us understand more about human memory.

[Please remember to complete the evaluation survey for this Reading the Research. The evaluation  link is on the References page at the end of this module. Thanks!]