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TPO10 Lecture 4
Psychology
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a Psychology Class.
Professor
OK. If I ask about the earliest thing you can remember, I will bet for most of you, your earliest memory would be about from about age 3, right? Well, that’s true for most adults. We can’t remember anything that happened before the age of 3. And this phenomenon is so widespread and well-documented it has a name. It is called childhood amnesia and was first documented in 1893.
As I said, this phenomenon refers to adults not being able to remember childhood incidents. It’s not children trying to remember events from last month or last year. Of course it follows that if you can’t remember an incident as a child, you probably won’t remember it as an adult. OK.
So … why is this? What are the reasons for childhood amnesia?
Well, once a popular explanation was that childhood memories are repressed ... uh, the memories are disturbing so that as adults we keep them buried. And so we can’t recall them and this is based on…well it’s not based on, on, on… the kind of solid research and lab testing we want to talk about today. So let’s put that explanation aside and concentrate on just two. OK?
It could be that as children we do form memories of things prior to age of 3, but forget them as we get grew older, that’s one explanation. Another possibility is that children younger than 3 lack some cognitive capacity for memory. And that idea, that children are unable to form memories, that’s been the dominant belief in psychology for the past 100 years.
And this idea is very much tied to things, the theories of Jean Piaget and also to language development in children. So Piaget’s theory of cognitive development--- Piaget suggested that because they don’t have language, children younger than 18-24 months leave in the here and now, that is they lack the mean to symbolically represent objects, and events, that are not physically present. Everybody get that? Piaget proposed that young children don’t have a way to represent things that aren’t right in front of them. That’s what language does, right? Words represent things, ideas.
Once language starts to develop from about age 2, they do has a system for symbolic representation and can talk about things which are not in their immediate environment including the past. Of course he didn’t claim that infants don’t have any sort of memory, it is acknowledged that they can recognize some stimuli, like faces. And for many years this model was very much in favor in psychology, even though memory tests were never performed on young children.
Well, finally in the 1980s, a study was done. And this study showed that very young children under the age of 2 do have the capacity for recall. Now if the children can’ t talk, how was recall tested? Well, that is a good question, since the capacity for recall has always been linked with the ability to talk.
So the researcher set up an experiment using imitation-based tasks. Adults used props, uh, toys or other objects to demonstrate an action that had 2 steps. The children were asked to imitate the steps immediately and then again after delays of one or more month. And even after a delay, the children could…could recall or replicate the action, the objects used, the steps involved and the order of the steps. Even children as young as 9 months!
Now, tests showed that there was a faster rate of forgetting among the youngest children but most importantly it showed that the development of recall did not depend on language development. And that was an importance finding. I guess I should add that the findings, don’t say that there was no connection between the development of language and memory. There are some of evidence that being able to talk about an event does lead to having a stronger memory of that event. But that does not seem the real issue here.
So, back to our question about the cause of childhood amnesia, well, there is something called the rate of forgetting. And childhood amnesia may reflect a high rate of forgetting, in other words, children under the age of 3 do form memories and do so without language. But they forget the memories at a fast rate, probably faster than adults do. Researchers have set a standard….sort of an unexpected rate of forgetting, but that expected rate was set based on the tests done on the adults. So what is the rate of forgetting for children under the age of 3? We expect it to be high, but the tests to prove this really haven’t been done yet.
《心理学》
教授：好了，如果我问大家最早的记忆在什么时期，我猜你们多数人都会说在3岁左右，对吗?对多数成年人来讲确实如此.3岁之前的事情我们基本都不记得。 这种现象太普遍且证据充足，因此它还有一个名字。叫做儿童健忘症，首次在1893年被文献中所记载。正如我刚才所说，这种现象指的是成年人不能够想起孩子的事情。而不是说儿童试图回忆上个月或者是过去几年的事情。当然了，如果说你们小时候也记不得，长大后就更不能记得了。那么，为什么会这样呢?儿童健忘症的原因是什么呢?曾经一个流行的解释是儿童的记忆受到抑制和干扰，因为我们成年后就回忆起来有障碍。我们能够回忆起来这些事情，但是要建立在……不是，不能建立在……我们今天要讲的在实验室中自主研发的测试。我们先不讲这个，就集中说说以下两点好吧。
可能我们在3岁之前的阶段确实也形成了记忆，但是在我们长大的过程中就慢慢遗忘了，这是一种解释。还有一种可能就是3岁以下的孩子缺乏记忆认知能力。而在过去的100年中，这种儿童不能形成记忆的想法，一直在心理学界获得广泛认可。这种想法和事物、与让.皮亚杰的理论以及孩子们语言的发展都有很大关联。说说让.皮亚杰的认知发展理论----让.皮亚杰提出由于18-24个月以下的孩子不会说话，那么就缺乏来表示物体，以及那些无法用实体呈现的事件的记忆符号。大家都明白了?皮亚杰提出儿童没有办法呈现那些并没有展现在他们面前的事物。这就是语言的功能了，对吗?词汇可以形容事物、想法。一旦语言在儿童2岁左右开始发育的时候，他们就有了能一套呈现符号系统，而且能立即说出不在场的东西，也包括过去的事物。当然他没有说婴儿没有任何记忆，大家都知道婴儿可以认知一些刺激物体，如人的长相。这种模式在心理学界一直都被广泛认可，尽管没有在孩子身上进行过任何试验。在20世纪80年代，研究终于结束了。
研究显示2岁一下的孩童有回忆的能力。 既然孩子那时候还不能说话，那么试验是怎么进行的呢?这是个好问题，因为回忆的能力总是与语言能力相关联。所以研究者就用模拟测试金进行了实验。成人用适当的玩具或者其他的物体来进行演示，包括两个步骤。要求孩子们立即来模仿这些步骤，然后过了一个多月，甚至是更久，孩子们就不能想起来并展示了，包括使用的物体、演示的步骤及顺序。实验证明，现在甚至是9个月大的孩子也有种更快的遗忘方式，但更重要的是，实验显示儿童不是根据语言发育来回忆的。 但是还有一项重大的发现，我想我该提及一下，不能说语言发育和记忆没有关联。有证据显示，有能力去讲一个事件会加强记忆。但是问题并不在这儿。好了，再回到儿童健忘症的缘由这个话题上来，有一种说法叫遗忘率。儿童健忘症可能就是遗忘率的一种体现。换言之,三岁以下的孩子能够形成记忆，而且与语言没有关系。但是他们遗忘的速度很快，很可能比成人快。研究人员设立了一个标准，一种意料之外的遗忘率，但是我们能想到的遗忘率是基于成人测试基础上形成的。那么三岁以下的孩子的遗忘率是多少呢? 我们认为会很高，但能够反驳这个观点的测试目前还没有进行过。
以上就是托福听力TPO10原文中Lecture 4的文本内容，希望大家能够用心体会，更多TPO文本内容小编稍后为您呈现。最后，小编祝大家在托福考试中取得好成绩！
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