Generalization from early to middle childhood

Abstract

Generalization enables individuals to apply knowledge derived from past experiences in novel situations, yet it is unclear whether common experimental paradigms probe the same underlying ability in early to middle childhood. We assessed 84 children aged 4, 6, and 8 years on four paradigms, namely statistical learning, associative inference, transitive inference, and categorization, and examined age effects and cross-task concordance. Accuracy increased with age in every task, but inter-task correlations remained inconclusive. Focused analyses of the associative and transitive inference task showed that older children’s success increasingly relied on memory for directly learned pairs. In younger children, the weak memory–generalization link diverged by task: 4- and 6-year-olds often solved transitive inferences without accurate pair memory, whereas such increased memory-independent generalization was not evident in associative inference. Computational modeling supported this pattern, indicating that younger children used value-based reinforcement learning to solve transitive problems, whereas 8-year-olds employed a pair-memory strategy. Taken together, our findings raise the question whether generalization is a unitary construct or not, underscoring the need for multi-indicator and model-based approaches to further characterize its underlying mechanisms.