ABSTRACT
This study investigated the typical development of unconditional learning, conditional learning, and transitive inference abilities. Seventy-one 3–12-year-old children and twenty-two 20–30-year-old adults were tested on touchscreen tasks: a visual learning task assessing the ability to learn unconditional relationships between two stimuli (A > B, C > D), a 3-item conditional learning task (A > B, B > C), and a 5-item conditional learning task (A > B, B > C, C > D, D > E) often used to assess transitive inference. Detailed analyses of individual performance for different learning and test pairs revealed that half of the 3–5.5-year-old children and most older participants exhibited unconditional learning. Although some children exhibited conditional learning from 5 years of age, the majority did not until 7.5 years. Surprisingly, 3–12-year-old children did not exhibit transitive inference abilities, in contrast to 20–30-year-old adults. Our findings support the theory that the development of conditional learning and transitive inference abilities depends on late-developing brain structures including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the participants for making this study possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10199622.