Memories of structured input become increasingly distorted across development

Abstract

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the particular sequence in which the shapes occurred and/or their group-level structure. After accounting for developmental improvements in overall memory, all ages remembered specific transitions, while memory for group membership was only observed in older children and adults (age by test-type interaction η2 =.05). Thus, while young children form memories for specifics of structured experience, memory for derived associations is refined later—underscoring that adults and young children form different memories despite identical experience.