单选题 What"s your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you heard thunder or watched a television program? Adults seldom 1 events much earlier than the year or so before entering school, 2 children younger than three or four 3 retain any specific, personal experiences.
A variety of explanations have been 4 by psychologists for this "childhood amnesia". One argues that the hippo-campus, the region of the brain which is 5 for forming memories, does not mature until about the age of two. But the most popular theory 6 that, since adults don"t think like children, they cannot 7 childhood memories. Adults think in words, and their life memories are like stories or 8 one event follows 9 as in a novel or film. But when they search through their mental 10 for early childhood memories to add to this verbal life story, they don"t find any that fit the 11 It"s like trying to find a Chinese word in an English dictionary.
Now psychologist Annette Simms of the New York State University offers a new 12 for childhood amnesia. She argues that there simply aren"t any early childhood memories to 13 . According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else"s spoken description of their personal 14 in order to turn their own short-term, quickly forgotten 15 of them into long term memories. In other 16 , children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about 17 — Mother talking about the afternoon 18 looking for seashells at the beach or Dad asking them about their day at Ocean Park. Without this 19 reinforcement, says Dr. Simms, children cannot form 20 memories of their personal experiences.