Bauer Patricia J
Emory University.
Psychol Rev. 2015 Apr;122(2):204-31. doi: 10.1037/a0038939.
Personal-episodic or autobiographical memories are an important source of evidence for continuity of self over time. Numerous studies conducted with adults have revealed a relative paucity of personal-episodic or autobiographical memories of events from the first 3 to 4 years of life, with a seemingly gradual increase in the number of memories until approximately age 7 years, after which an adult distribution has been assumed. Historically, this so-called infantile amnesia or childhood amnesia has been attributed either to late development of personal-episodic or autobiographical memory (implying its absence in the early years of life) or to an emotional, cognitive, or linguistic event that renders early autobiographical memories inaccessible to later recollection. However, neither type of explanation alone can fully account for the shape of the distribution of autobiographical memories early in life. In contrast, the complementary processes account developed in this article acknowledges early, gradual development of the ability to form, retain, and later retrieve memories of personally relevant past events, as well as an accelerated rate of forgetting in childhood relative to adulthood. The adult distribution of memories is achieved as (a) the quality of memory traces increases, through addition of more, better elaborated, and more tightly integrated personal-episodic or autobiographical features; and (b) the vulnerability of mnemonic traces decreases, as a result of more efficient and effective neural, cognitive, and specifically mnemonic processes, thus slowing the rate of forgetting. The perspective brings order to an array of findings from the adult and developmental literatures.
个人情节性或自传体记忆是自我随时间延续的重要证据来源。针对成年人开展的大量研究表明，人们对生命最初3至4年发生的事件的个人情节性或自传体记忆相对较少，记忆数量似乎会逐渐增加，直到大约7岁，之后便呈现出成年人的记忆分布状态。从历史上看，这种所谓的婴儿期遗忘或童年期遗忘，要么归因于个人情节性或自传体记忆的发展较晚（这意味着在生命早期不存在这种记忆），要么归因于某种情感、认知或语言事件，使得早期的自传体记忆在后来难以被回忆起来。然而，单独的任何一种解释都无法完全说明生命早期自传体记忆分布的形态。相比之下，本文提出的互补过程理论认为，形成、保留并在之后提取与个人相关的过去事件记忆的能力在早期是逐渐发展的，而且童年期的遗忘速度相对于成年期更快。随着（a）记忆痕迹的质量通过添加更多、更精细且整合更紧密的个人情节性或自传体特征而提高；以及（b）由于更高效且有效的神经、认知特别是记忆过程，记忆痕迹的脆弱性降低，遗忘速度减慢，从而实现了成年人的记忆分布状态。这种观点为成人和发展心理学文献中的一系列研究结果带来了秩序。
