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When Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings' names — even the dog's name. "Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha," she says.
萨曼莎·德芙勒还小的时候，她妈妈经常会把她的名字叫成她兄弟姐妹的，甚至是她家狗的。德芙勒：“丽贝卡、泽西、茉莉、塔克、萨曼莎。”
A lot of people mix up children's names or friends' names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla., and she wanted to find out why it happens. So she, and her colleagues, Cassidy Fox, Christin Ogle, and senior researcher David Rubin, did a survey of 1,700 men and women of different ages, and she found that naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone sometimes mixes up the names of family and friends. Their findings were published in the journal Memory & Cognition.
很多人都会搞混自己孩子或朋友的名字，但德芙勒是罗林斯学院的认知科学家，她想知道这为什么会发生。所以她调查了1700名不同年龄段的男性和女性，并发现讲错名字是很常见的，几乎所有人都在某些时候搞混过家人和朋友的名字。她的发现已被刊载于《记忆与认知》期刊。
"It's a normal cognitive glitch," Deffler says.
德芙勒：“这是正常的认知故障。”
It's not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how the brain categorizes names. It's like having special folders for family names and friends names stored in the brain. When people used the wrong name, overwhelmingly the name that was used was in the same category, Deffler says. It was in the same folder.
这跟记忆力不好或衰老无关，而跟我们的大脑如何归类名字有关。我们大脑里就像是有专门储存家人和朋友名字的文件夹，当我们用错了名字，它大多都是跟正确的名字一个类别的，即在同一个文件夹里。