急！GWD12 Q7 答案

      The term “episodic memory” was introduced by Tulving to refer to what he considered a uniquely human capacity—the ability to recollect specific past events, to travel back into the past in one’s own mind—as distinct from the capacity simply to use information acquired through past experiences.  Subsequently, Clayton et al. developed criteria to test for episodic memory in animals.  According to these criteria, episodic memories are not of individual bits of information; they involve multiple components of a single event “bound” together.  Clayton sought to examine evidence of scrub jays’ accurate memory of “what,” “where,” and “when” information and their binding of this information.  In the wild, these birds store food for retrieval later during periods of food scarcity.  Clayton’s experiment required jays to remember the type, location, and freshness of stored food based on a unique learning event.  Crickets were stored in one location and peanuts in another.  Jays prefer crickets, but crickets degrade more quickly.  Clayton’s birds switched their preference from crickets to peanuts once the food had been stored for a certain length of time, showing that they retain information about the what, the where, and the when.  Such experiments cannot, however, reveal whether the birds were reexperiencing the past when retrieving the information.  Clayton acknowledged this by using the term “episodic-like” memory.

A.      Animals’ abilities to use information about a specific past event are not conclusive evidence of episodic memory.

B.      Animals do not share humans’ abilities to reexperience the past through memory.

C.      The accuracy of animals’ memories is difficult to determine through direct experimentation.

D.      Humans tend to recollect single bits of information more accurately than do animals.

E.       The binding of different kinds of information is not a distinctive feature of episodic memory.

答案是A，但我觉得是E。可是文章第一句就说The term “episodic memory” was introduced by Tulving to refer to what he considered a uniquely human capacity, as distinct from the capacity simply to use information acquired through past experiences. (我去掉了补充解释的破折号使句意更简洁) 意思是episodic memory是人类独有的能力，与简单地使用从以前经历中得到的信息是截然不同的。所以A讲的动物有使用以前经历的信息的能力根本就跟episodic memory是两码事。换句话说，别说是conclusive evidence了，根本就不是evidence。也不是本文所着重讨论的，因为动物的这个能力已经使公认的了。

而答案E说的是“把不同的信息综合起来”就是文章中实验的鸟证明出的能力，但文章的最后一句说虽然那只鸟有这个能力，但不足以证明它有episodic memory，所以把不同的信息综合起来的能力不是episodic memory独有的特点。

大家觉得是这样呢？还是我钻牛角尖了?