ABSTRACT
Throughout this volume and related books (e.g., Kail & Hagen, 1977; Spear & Campbell, 1979) a common observation is that younger organisms show less learning or memory than do adults. It is often tempting to ascribe such differences to the immaturity of whatever fundamental neurophysiological features or events (“mechanisms”) are responsible for recording permanently in the brain the residue of experience. This temptation should be resisted. Among the chapters of the present and related volumes one rarely or never sees reference to the maturation of such a basic neurophysiological mechanism. Those of us who observe daily the learning and memory of young animals or children think, or at least write and talk, in quite different terms. This is in my opinion a good thing, for several reasons: A separate neurophysiological mechanism that acts specifically to establish learning and memory has been “identified” only in terms of a number of potential candidates, at best; such a mechanism is unlikely to be fully verified at a general level for many years after it is identified in simple systems; and as I shall suggest later, it may very well not exist at all.
