Eyeblink conditioning is a paradigm that allows the study of aspects of the neural mechanism of memory in humans. This paradigm has been extensively studied in animals and human beings and its functional neuroanatomy appears to be well understood, involving the hippocampus and cerebellum. The performance on this task is most likely independent of subject motivation. Moreover, manipulation of the intervals between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli allows to study subliminal forms of mnemonic encoding ("delay" task) as well as learning that is associated with conscious awareness ("trace" task). This makes eyeblink conditioning particularly suited for study in patient populations, and particularly in schizophrenia where motivation and attention are frequently confounding factors in the study of memory processes.