Abstract:

The ability to acquire new structured knowledge and generalize to new situations is fundamental to adaptive functioning, enabling us to move beyond limited experiences and build portable knowledge. Prior work suggests that semantic generalization improves substantially across childhood between ages three and eight. With age, children’s generalization becomes increasingly reliant on episodic memories. While previous developmental studies have focused on generalization along a single dimension, generalization in real-life situations often requires not only learning individual rules, but also flexibly combining multiple rules to generate new inferences. In this talk, I will present findings from a new experiment that aimed to characterize children’s and adolescents’ abilities in each of these building blocks for constructing a multidimensional space of structured knowledge and for generalizing across new materials. I will discuss the developmental pattern of each building block of out-of-sample generalization and new approaches to characterizing the multidimensional conceptual space.