在过去很长一段时间里,人们根据对动物进行的“刺激剥夺”的实验盲目推出结论:儿童智力发展的落后,主要是缺乏刺激即缺乏感觉经验所致。因而把丰富幼儿的生活环境视为提高幼儿智力的最重要的途径。然而事实并不如此简单。近年来,美国对许多智力发展缓慢、生活环境不良的儿童作了系统的观察和研究,结果发现,在这些儿童所处的环境中,总的感性刺激是丰富的,并不缺乏。例如,犹太人居住区的儿童生活在一个很嘈杂的环境中,那里有着大量的视觉的、听觉的和嗅觉的刺激。他们所缺的只是“优质”的刺激,以及对刺激的合理组织。无论是处在优 For a long time now, people came to the conclusion blindly based on “stimulating deprivation” experiments on animals: the backwardness of children’s intellectual development is mainly due to the lack of stimulation or the lack of sensory experience. Therefore, enriching the living environment of young children is regarded as the most important way to improve children’s intelligence. However, the fact is not that simple. In recent years, the United States has systematically observed and studied many children with slow mental development and poor living conditions and found that the total perceptual stimulation in these children’s environments is abundant and not lacking. For example, children living in Jewish settlements live in a very noisy environment with a great deal of visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli. What they lack is just “good quality” stimuli, and reasonable organization of stimuli. Whether it is excellent