University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Memory. 2010 Nov;18(8):831-44. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2010.510476. Epub 2010 Oct 4.
The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. We found that the distribution of adults' early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.
儿童期失忆是指成年人无法回忆起婴儿期和幼儿期的事件。如果我们将成年人能够回忆起的记忆数量作为其童年时期年龄的函数进行绘制，那么报告的记忆数量会随着年龄的增长逐渐增加。通常，这一发现被用来论证记忆发展的逐渐变化导致了学龄前儿童期失忆的逐渐减少。或者，将参与者的数据汇总可能掩盖了儿童期失忆消退过程中更突然的阶段性变化。在本研究中，我们检查了单个参与者的童年记忆数量和分布。六位成年人被反复问及他们的童年记忆。我们发现，成年人的幼儿期记忆的分布可能不如汇总数据所显示的那样连续。这一发现对目前关于儿童期失忆的解释具有重要意义。
