Declarative memory includes memory for such things as daily episodes, words and their meanings, and history.
Procedural memory includes motor skills, associations, puzzle solving skills, and so on.
But the pace of research in this field has now markedly increased due to several new imaging techniques that allow identification of brain regions activated in normal conscious subjects during various mental tasks. There is additional brain damage evidence that regions of the frontal lobes also contribute to declarative memory. Brain lesion studies, however, cannot distinguish whether a given brain region normally participates in the encoding of ongoing experiences into memories, or the storage of the memories over time, or the later retrieval of those memories. In contrast, the newer methods of functional neuroimaging can indeed make such distinctions. J.B. Brewer et al report the use of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify specific brain activations that differentiated between visual experiences that were later remembered well, remembered less well, or forgotten.