TPO托福阅读练习题37及参考答案（四）

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.