That experience influence
subsequent behaviour is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory. Constant practice has such an effect on memory as to lead to
skillful performance on the piano, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. So-called intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being a primary
requirement for
reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering many earlier experiences.
Practice(or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any
learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been
learned tends to be forgotten; and athe adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting can be seen to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural
selection in animals. Indeed, when one's memory of an emotionally
painful experience lead to serious anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an
evolutionary
interpretation might make it difficult to undrestand how the
commonlygradual process of forgetting survived narual selecition.
In thinking about the
evolution of memory together with all its possible aspects, it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time, since old memories
weaken and the new tend to stand out, providing clues for inferring
duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer, for example,
learned behaviour that might have been correct a
decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who(by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their
everyday activities were full of confusion. This forgetting seems to serve that survival of the individual and the
species.
Another line of thought assumes a memory
storage system of
limited capacity that provides adptive flexibility specifically through forgetting. In this view,
continual adjustments are made between learning or memory
storage(input) and forgetting(output). Indeed, there is evidence that the rate at which individuals forget is directly
related to how much they have
learned. Such data offers gross support of
contemporary models of memory that assume an input-output balance.
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