Developmental differences in temporal schema acquisition impact reasoning decisions

Abstract

Schemas capture patterns across multiple experiences, accumulating information about common event structures that guide decision making in new contexts. Schemas are an important principle of leading theories of cognitive development; yet, we know little about how children and adolescents form schemas and use schematic knowledge to guide decisions. Here, we show that the ability to acquire schematic knowledge based on the temporal regularities of events increases during childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, we show that temporally mediated schematic knowledge biases reasoning decisions in an age-dependent manner. Participants with greater temporal schematic knowledge were more likely to infer that temporally related items shared other, nontemporal properties, with adults showing the greatest relationship between schema knowledge and reasoning choices. These data indicate that the mechanisms underlying schema formation and expression are not fully developed until adulthood and may reflect the ongoing maturation of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex through adolescence.

Contingency of Semantic Generalization on Episodic Specificity: Variations Across Development

“…, generalization performance increases from early to middle childhood. This age effect on generalization aligns with some previous findings that show a protracted improvement on other paradigms that tap the extraction of statistical regularities among items within a continuous stream of visual stimuli(Arciuli & Simpson, 2011;Pudhiyidath, Roome, Coughlin, …”

“…Crucially, generalization by young children was contingent on memories of the specific item identity and the conceptual common ground that linked together related episodes, whereas generalization by young adults was contingent on memory for specific itemcontext linkage. Nguyen, & Preston, 2019;Schlichting, Guarino, Schapiro, Turk-Browne, & Preston, 2017;Shufaniya & Arnon, 2018, but see Finn, Kharitonova, Holtby, & Sheridan, 2018.…”

Contingency of semantic generalization on episodic specificity varies across development

“…Age-related improvements in generalization from early to middle childhood corroborate previous findings using different paradigms, including associative inference [13][14][15] and temporal regularity. 16 Although older children and adults did not differ in our study, previous studies reported an increase in associative inference or detection of recurring patterns from age 6 to 14. 15 Generalization may continue to change during middle childhood.…”

Memories of structured input become increasingly distorted across development - Working Paper

“…Virtually all statistical learning studies comparing performance between children and adults have shown developmental improvements in participants' ability to select old sequences over lures in alternative forced choice tests (Finn et al, 2018;Jung et al, 2020;Pudhiyidath et al, 2020;Raviv & Arnon, 2018;Schlichting et al, 2016, c.f. Raviv & Arnon, 2018Saffran et al, 1997).…”

“…Shapes were grouped to form reliable units (here, triplets) within which the underlying associations (i.e., shape-to-shape transitions) always occurred in the same order. Therefore, in contrast to past work in which there has been variability across repetitions of the particular order at exposure (Karuza et al, 2017;Pudhiyidath et al, 2020;Schapiro et al, 2016), here such variability is intentionally not present in the stream. There is an extensive body of literature documenting the ability of even infants to learn such statistical structures; however, due to the nature of past memory assessments, the particular representations upon which their behaviors are based remain ambiguous.…”