Abstract: The evidences of functional dissociation and stochastic independence confirmed task dissociation between implicit and explicit measures. The dissociations have been assumed to indicate that the memory process or memory systems underlying performance in explicit tests differ from those underlying performance in implicit memory tests. However, recent studies showed that reliabilities of implicit measures were significantly lower than that of explicit measures. As a consequence, if simple functional dissociations are to be used in future research, more attention needs to be paid to the statistical power of the relevant group comparisons and to the psychometric qualities of the memory measurement instruments.

Key words: functional dissociation, stochastic independence, reliability, construct validity, statistical power