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When less is more: The impact of repetition on pattern separation across development
Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Bailey Agard1, Amy Finn1; 1University of Toronto
Though young children typically remember less than their older counterparts, several studies have found that what they do remember is more specific, and sometimes even more accurate than older children and adults (Gualtieri & Finn, 2022). Despite this, young children display poor memory for specifics when discriminating between an old item and a new, similar-looking lure (Rollins et al., 2023). We investigated the possibility that poor specific memory in this context is due to accelerated forgetting rates and the ongoing development of one-shot learning systems during young childhood (Forest et al., 2023). We hypothesized that if so, adding repetition during learning may help younger children to distinguish between previously studied items and perceptually similar lures-- in contrast with adults, whose specific memory can become worse with repetition (Reagh & Yassa, 2014). In the current study, children aged 5-6 (n=32), 9-10 (n=39) and adults (n=96) were shown repeating and non-repeating items during exposure before being asked to make old/new judgements about items that were identical, similar-looking, or completely novel. Additionally, similar items range from being highly to minimally similar to an item shown at exposure. For older children and adults, repetition did not improve their specific memory, and worsened their performance for lures that were highly similar to its paired exposure image. Repetition also worsened younger children’s specific memory except for minimally similar lures, suggesting that poor lure discrimination in childhood may not be due to faster forgetting and slower learning, but rather to the latent development of pattern separation.
Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging