Development of conditional learning abilities in children from 3 to 12 years of age

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiple memory systems
• relational
• hippocampus
• typical development
• transitive inference

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.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation to PBL and PL [grant number 100019_165481], and the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lausanne. The funders had no role in the design of the study, in the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, in the preparation of this manuscript nor in the decision to submit it for publication.