婴儿的记忆缺失

(机器翻译,未校对)

婴儿健忘症
你还记得你三岁之前的生活吗?很少有人能记得他们早年发生的任何事情。成年人对未来几年的记忆也往往很少。大多数人只记得少数事件——通常是有意义且与众不同的事件,例如住院或兄弟姐妹的出生。
如何解释这种无法回忆早期经历的原因?纯粹的时间流逝并不能说明这一点。成年人对 35 年前和他们一起上高中的人的照片有很好的识别度。另一个看似合理的解释——婴儿在发育的这个阶段没有形成持久的记忆——也是不正确的。两岁半到三岁的孩子会记得第一年发生的经历,而十一个月大的孩子会记得一年后的一些事件。婴儿健忘症反映了对性冲动事件的压抑或抑制的假设也不能解释这种现象。虽然可能会发生这种压抑,但人们也无法记住婴儿期和幼儿期的普通事件。
其他三种解释似乎更有希望。一个涉及与记忆相关的生理变化。大脑额叶的成熟贯穿整个童年早期,而这部分大脑可能对于以以后可以检索的方式记住特定事件至关重要。婴幼儿的长期记忆展示涉及他们重复他们曾见过或做过的运动活动,例如在黑暗中伸手去拿物体,把瓶子放在洋娃娃的嘴里,或者拉开玩具的两块.大脑的生理成熟水平可能支持这些类型的记忆,但不需要明确的口头描述。
第二种解释涉及社会世界对儿童语言使用的影响。聆听和讲述有关事件的故事可能会帮助儿童以能够持续到童年和成年期的方式存储信息。通过听到开头、中间和结尾清晰的故事,孩子们可能会学会以多年后能够描述的方式提取事件的要点。与这种观点一致,当孩子大约三岁时,父母和孩子越来越多地讨论过去的事件。然而,听到这样的故事不足以让年幼的孩子形成持久的记忆。给两岁的孩子讲这样的故事似乎不会产生持久的语言记忆。
婴儿健忘症的第三种可能解释涉及婴儿编码[1]信息的方式与年龄较大的儿童和成人检索信息的方式之间的不相容性。人们能否记住一个事件,关键取决于他们之前编码信息的方式与他们后来尝试检索信息的方式之间的匹配度。该人能够更好地重构材料编码的视角,回忆成功的可能性就越大。
这种观点得到了多种因素的支持,这些因素可能会导致幼儿的编码与年龄较大的儿童和成人的检索工作不匹配。对于一个头部离地面只有两三英尺的人来说,这个世界看起来与一个头部离地面五六英尺的人有很大的不同。年龄较大的儿童和成人经常尝试检索他们看到的事物的名称,但婴儿不会口头编码这些信息。诸如生日聚会或去医生办公室之类的事件类别的一般知识有助于老年人编码他们的经历,但同样,婴儿和幼儿不太可能在这些知识结构中编码许多经历。
这三种对婴儿健忘症的解释并不相互排斥。事实上,他们相互支持。生理上的不成熟可能是婴幼儿无法形成极其持久的记忆的部分原因,即使他们听到了促进学龄前儿童这种记忆的故事。听到这些故事可能会导致学龄前儿童对事件的各个方面进行编码,从而使他们能够形成成年后可以访问的记忆。相反,改进对他们听到的内容的编码可以帮助他们更好地理解和记住故事,从而使故事对记住未来事件更有用。因此,所有三种解释——生理成熟、听力和讲述过去事件的故事,以及事件关键方面的改进编码——似乎都可能与克服婴儿失忆症有关。

原文

Infantile Amnesia
What do you remember about your life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that happened to them in their early years. Adults’ memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. Most people remember only a few events—usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a sibling’s birth.
How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer passage of time does not account for it; adults have excellent recognition of pictures of people who attended high school with them 35 years earlier. Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in development—also is incorrect. Children two and a half to three years old remember experiences that occurred in their first year, and eleven month olds remember some events a year later. Nor does the hypothesis that infantile amnesia reflects repression— or holding back— of sexually charged episodes explain the phenomenon. While such repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary events from the infant and toddler periods, either.
Three other explanations seem more promising. One involves physiological changes relevant to memory. Maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain continues throughout early childhood, and this part of the brain may be critical for remembering particular episodes in ways that can be retrieved later. Demonstrations of infants’ and toddlers’ long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier, such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. The brain’s level of physiological maturation may support these types of memories, but not ones requiring explicit verbal descriptions.
A second explanation involves the influence of the social world on children’s language use. Hearing and telling stories about events may help children store information in ways that will endure into later childhood and adulthood. Through hearing stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending, children may learn to extract the gist of events in ways that they will be able to describe many years later. Consistent with this view, parents and children increasingly engage in discussions of past events when children are about three years old. However, hearing such stories is not sufficient for younger children to form enduring memories. Telling such stories to two year olds does not seem to produce long-lasting verbalizable memories.
A third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants encode[1]information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it. Whether people can remember an event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in which they later attempt to retrieve it. The better able the person is to reconstruct the perspective from which the material was encoded, the more likely that recall will be successful.
This view is supported by a variety of factors that can create mismatches between very young children’s encoding and older children’s and adults’ retrieval efforts. The world looks very different to a person whose head is only two or three feet above the ground than to one whose head is five or six feet above it. Older children and adults often try to retrieve the names of things they saw, but infants would not have encoded the information verbally. General knowledge of categories of events such as a birthday party or a visit to the doctor’s office helps older individuals encode their experiences, but again, infants and toddlers are unlikely to encode many experiences within such knowledge structures.
These three explanations of infantile amnesia are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they support each other. Physiological immaturity may be part of why infants and toddlers do not form extremely enduring memories, even when they hear stories that promote such remembering in preschoolers. Hearing the stories may lead preschoolers to encode aspects of events that allow them to form memories they can access as adults. Conversely, improved encoding of what they hear may help them better understand and remember stories and thus make the stories more useful for remembering future events. Thus, all three explanations—physiological maturation, hearing and producing stories about past events, and improved encoding of key aspects of events—seem likely to be involved in overcoming infantile amnesia.

来源:TOEFL TPO 6