Events structure information accessibility less in children than adults

Abstract To manage the onslaught of continuously unfolding information in our complex environments, we adults are known to carve up our continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentation directly shapes how our everyday experiences are construed: content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state, which is then dropped after an event boundary. The greater accessibility of event-specific information has been shown to influence—at its most basic level—how information is processed and remembered. However, it is as yet unknown if accessibility is similarly influenced by event boundaries in children, who are still developing the working memory capacity and semantic knowledge thought to support event segmentation. Here, we tested seven- to nine-year-old children's and adults' recognition of objects experienced either within or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and faster to correctly recognize objects that last occurred within events versus across event boundaries. We, however, additionally observed an interaction such that children's access to recent experience was less influenced by event boundaries than adults'. Thus, while the spontaneous segmentation of complex events emerges by middle childhood, event structure shapes the active contents of children's minds less reliably than adults'.