首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
The Advantages of Being Helpless At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A
The Advantages of Being Helpless At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A
admin
2013-09-26
31
问题
The Advantages of Being Helpless
At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can walk slowly across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise(乌龟)in Aesop’s fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish.
Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless. They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?
In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscar and Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development(皮质发育)is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity.
This claim hinges on a peculiar and unique feature of our cognitive architecture: the stunningly slow development of the prefrontal cortex(前额皮质), or PFC. The PFC is often referred to as the "control" center of the brain. One of its main functions is of selectively filtering information from the senses, allowing us to attend to specific actions, goals, or tasks. For this reason, "cognitive control" tasks are thought to be one of the best assessors of PFC function and maturity.
The Stroop task(斯特鲁法)serves as a simple assessor of PFC function in adults. The task involves naming the ink color of a contrasting color word: for example, you might see the word "red" written in green ink, in which case you have to say " green. " Tricky or not, healthy adults can successfully complete the task with only minor hesitation.
Children, with their immature PFC’s, are a different story. Typically, the younger children are, the worse they are at solving Stroop-like tasks, and under the age of four, they outright fail them. While young children are sensitive, apt learners, and often appear to fully understand what is being asked of them, they are unable to mediate the conflicting demands present in these sorts of tasks, and thus fail them, time and time again. Three-year olds simply cannot direct how they attend to or respond to the world.
Thompson-Schill and her colleagues suggest that this inability to direct attention has important consequences when it comes to learning about uncertain events. For example, imagine you are playing a guessing game: You have to choose one of two options, either A or B, one of which leads to a prize, and the other does not. After a few rounds, you notice that about 3/4 of the time the prize is at A, and the rest of the time it is at B, so you decide to guess "A" 75 percent of the time and "B" 25 percent of the time. This is called probability matching, and it is the response pattern most adults tend to adopt in these circumstances. However, if the goal is to win the most prizes, it is not the best strategy. In fact, to maximize the number of correct predictions, you should always pick the more frequent outcome(or, in this case, always pick " A").
Interestingly, if you were playing this kind of guessing game with a kid, you would see that he would employ the maximization strategy almost immediately because they lack the cognitive flexibility that would allow them to alternate between A and B. Fortunately for them, in this guessing game scenario, maximization is the right choice.
While it may not be immediately obvious what this has to do with language learning, it just might have everything to do with it, because language relies on conventions. In order for language to work, speakers and listeners have to have the same idea about what things mean, and they have to use words in similar ways. This is where children come in. Young children, as it turns out, act like finely tuned antennas(天线), picking up the dominant frequency in their surroundings and ignoring the static. Because of this—because children tend to pick up on what is common and consistent, while ignoring what is variable and unreliable—they end up homing in on and reproducing only the most frequent patterns in what they hear. In doing so they fail to learn many of the subtleties and characteristics present in adult speech(they will come to learn or invent those later). However, this one-track learning style means that what they do learn is highly conventionalized.
The superiority of children’s convention learning has been revealed in a series of ingenious studies by psychologists Carta Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport, who tested how children and adults react to variable and inconsistent input when learning an artificial language. Strikingly, Hudson-Kam and Newport found that while children tended to ignore "noise" in the input, systematizing any variations they were exposed to, adults did just the opposite, and reproduced the variability they encountered. Children’s inability to filter their learning allows them to impose order on variable, inconsistent input, and this appears to play a crucial part in the establishment of stable linguistic norms. Studies of deaf children have shown that even when parental attempts at sign are error-prone and inconsistent, children still extract the conventions of a standard sign language from them. Indeed, the variable patterns produced by parents who learn sign language offers insight into what might happen if children did not maximize in learning: language, as a system, would become less conventional. What words meant and the patterns in which they were used would become more unstable, and all languages would begin to resemble pidgins(混杂语言).
While no language is completely stable, there is a balance to be struck between an individual’s expressivity and the conventions that underpin it, and children clearly play an important role in maintaining this balance. Children may learn the established characteristics of their community, but they do so only because these forms are stable in their input. They are unlikely to adopt highly unusual or characteristic forms or sequences that they’ve heard only rarely, and when they themselves make errors, they are similarly unlikely to incorporate these errors into their language use over the long run. Individual societies are built upon these kinds of cultural and linguistic conventions, and a vast array of them. As social animals, human babies must somehow master not just " culture and language," but the specifics of their culture, and their language. Explaining how babies manage to learn all of this information is a formidable task. The research reviewed here reveals one advantage that nature may have conferred on human infants: when it comes to convention learning, children’s inability to think unconventionally or flexibly may be of huge benefit. Indeed, a number of neurological studies suggest that children who often exhibit marked language delays and characteristic language development experience a massive overgrowth of the prefrontal cortex over the first two years of life.
While learning conventions, it is greatly beneficial to children to be unable to think______
选项
答案
unconventionally or flexibly
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/k127777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
A、Thenewspaperhasfastnewscoverage.B、ThenewspapercanprovidemanyimageslikeCNN.C、Thenewspaperisgoodforpeopleto
Ascientistwhodoesresearchineconomicpsychologyandwhowantstopredictthewayinwhichconsumerswillspendtheirmoney
Inparagraph1theauthorintroduceshistopicbyrelating______.Accordingtotheauthor’sdescription,Asimo______.
Exceptionalchildrenaredifferentinsomesignificantwayfromothersofthesameage.Forthesechildrentodeveloptheirfull
A、Youngpeoplewhowanttorideacarforjoy.B、Professionalswhostealcarsforothercrimes.C、Peoplewholackmoneytobuya
A、Almostonemillion.B、About600thousand.C、Nearly400thousand.’D、Approximately200thousand.B综合推断题。文章提到每年被偷的车有100万辆,其中40%
ApproachestoAdaptingtothesociety1.很多学生感觉毕业后很难融入社会2.分析这一问题产生的原因3.我的看法
A、OrderticketsviatheInternet.B、Orderticketsbygoingtotheboxofficepersonally.C、Orderticketsbywritingaletter.D、
A、$100milliondollars.B、$670milliondollars.C、$20billiondollars.D、$25billiondollars.C短文说,今年假期网上消费估计达250亿美元,比去年增长25%,则去
HiringCelebritiesasVisitingProfessor1.目前有不少大学请明星当客座教授2.对这一现象,人们看法不同3.我的看法
随机试题
改善过滤效果的关键是什么?
腹膜炎患者采用半卧位,其目的包括()。
一胎龄34周的新生儿,体温34℃,腋肛温差为正值,恢复正常体温的时间最好是( )。
城镇中发现甲类传染病和乙类传染病中的艾滋病、肺炭疽病的病人、病原携带者和疑似病人时,国家规定的报告时间是
患者,男,50岁。左下6缺失,设计双端固定桥时,对于固定连接体的要求正确的是
根据预算法律制度的规定,下列各项中,属于一般公共预算收入的有()。
英文字母A是中心对称图形.()
中国是一个农业社会,聚族而居、_______在农业大环境下,成了传统家庭的重心,由此而衍生出来的道德价值观,首先是儒家倡导的“亲亲”,形成长幼有序、孝悌仁爱的道德观念,并用家庭成员_______和继承下来的风俗习惯,有效地维护血缘秩序,履行个人在血缘等级关
①追求成熟,已经成为当今社会的一种_____________,尤其是涉世不深的年轻人,更想以老到、___________的面孔引起别人对自己的注意和重视。②事物的发展一旦停滞___________趋于保守,就将走向灭亡,___________为新生事物所取
Forsomeemployers,thepolicyoflifelongemploymentisparticularlyimportantbecauseitmeansthattheycanputmoremoneyand
最新回复
(
0
)