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, non-temporal 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Statistical learning
• temporal memory
• inductive inference
• cognitive maps
• generalization

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Susannah Cox, Nhu-Hao Hue, Benjamin Jones, Jillian Perez, Lauren Quesada, Bruce Rawlings, and Nicole Varga for assistance with participant recruitment, data collection and helpful discussion. We also thank the Children’s Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and its affiliated staff for their support with participant recruitment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers R01 MH100121 and R21 HD083785 to A.R.P. and F32 MH115585 to C.C.].