Opening the cuebox: The information children and young adults generate and rely on when making inferences from memory

Abstract

We used a cue-generation and a cue-selection paradigm to investigate the cues children (9- to 12-year-olds) and young adults (17-year-olds) generate and select for a range of inferences from memory. We found that children generated more cues than young adults, who, when asked why they did not generate some particular cues, responded that they did not consider them relevant for the task at hand. On average, the cues generated by children were more perceptual but as informative as the cues generated by young adults. When asked to select the most informative of two cues, both children and young adults tended to choose a hidden (i.e., not perceptual) cue. Our results suggest a developmental change in the cuebox (i.e., the set of cues used to make inferences from memory): New cues are added to the cuebox as more cues are learned, and some old, perceptual cues, although informative, are replaced with hidden cues, which, by both children and young adults, are generally assumed to be more informative than perceptual cues.

A developmental perspective on option generation and selection.

“…Indeed, only a few studies have explored the development of decision-making strategies across childhood (Klaczynski, 2001). In particular, decision-making research with children has focused on predecisional information search (i.e., the information children spontaneously ask for; see Ruggeri & Katsikopoulos, 2013; Ruggeri, Olsson, & Katsikopoulos, 2015; or the information children select from a set of informational items; see Davidson, 1991, 1996; Gregan-Paxton & Roedder John, 1995; Lindow & Betsch, 2018) or has investigated cue-based decision strategies (Betsch, Lehmann, Lindow, Lang, & Schoemann, 2016; Horn, Ruggeri, & Pachur, 2016; Mata, von Helversen, & Rieskamp, 2011). It has been shown, across a wide range of inference tasks (e.g., “Which of these two cars is more expensive?”), children tend to generate more predictive cues than adults (Ruggeri et al, 2015), possibly because they do not filter out the less relevant and predictive cues, as adults tend to do.…”