Developmental differences in temporal schema acquisition impact reasoning decisions

Abstract

Schemas capture patterns across multiple experiences, accumulating information about common event structures that guide decision making in new contexts. Schemas are an important principle of leading theories of cognitive development; yet, we know little about how children and adolescents form schemas and use schematic knowledge to guide decisions. Here, we show that the ability to acquire schematic knowledge based on the temporal regularities of events increases during childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, we show that temporally mediated schematic knowledge biases reasoning decisions in an age-dependent manner. Participants with greater temporal schematic knowledge were more likely to infer that temporally related items shared other, non-temporal properties, with adults showing the greatest relationship between schema knowledge and reasoning choices. These data indicate that the mechanisms underlying schema formation and expression are not fully developed until adulthood and may reflect the ongoing maturation of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex through adolescence.

Keywords: Statistical learning; cognitive maps; generalization; inductive inference; temporal memory.

Figure 1.

Experiment phases. a) Schematic of the temporal community structure that determined the sequence of characters during the ‘parade.’ While viewing the parade, participants made judgments about whether or not the presented character was ‘marching’ upright or had ‘fallen over.’ Unbeknownst to the participants, each of the fifteen characters was assigned to a node in the community structure (depicted by colored circles), with the lines representing the possible transitions between individual nodes in the structure. Each node is connected to four other nodes in the structure; the probability of a character being preceded or followed by a connected character in the parade sequence is equal among its four connections (0.25). This transition probability structure leads to three temporal communities (blue, green, and orange circles), with three central (dark colored circles) and two boundary (light colored circles) characters per community. Central characters are only connected to members of the same temporal community; boundary characters are connected to the three central members of the same community and one boundary character in a different temporal community. Boundary members of the same temporal community are not connected in the structure, therefore do not appear next to one another in the parade sequence. b) During the inductive inference task, one of the characters from the parade appeared at the top of the screen, and the participants were provided with information about which kind of habitat (desert, forest, or ocean) the character preferred. Participants then chose which of two characters on the bottom of the screen shared the same habitat as the cued character. One of the choices was always a member of the same temporal community and the other a member of a different temporal community. c) During the temporal knowledge task, two three-character sequences were presented on the left and right sides of the screen, and participants were asked to select the three-character sequence that contained ‘best friends’ who marched together in the parade. d) The temporal knowledge task had three trial types: central, 1-boundary, and 2-boundaries. For all trial types, the target sequence contained three characters from the same temporal community, while the foil sequence contained members of the three different temporal communities. Target sequences for central trials comprised three central members of the same community (dark borders). For 1-boundary trials, the target contained two central (dark borders) and one boundary member (light borders) of the same community. For 2-boundaries, the target contained the two boundary members (light borders) and one central member of the same community (dark border). The dotted lines represent the transition probability of any two members of the three-character sequences.

Figure 2.

Orientation task performance during temporal community structure learning. a) Overall performance on the orientation task was high with positive improvements in performance with age. b) Participants’ d-prime performance for detecting rotated trials, further suggesting that performance on the task improved with age.

Figure 3.

Temporal knowledge task performance. a) Participants’ selection of the target sequences during the temporal knowledge test increased linearly with age, but age-related effects on performance were mediated by trial type (central, 1-boundary, 2-boundaries) as indicated by a significant interaction between age and trial type. Target sequence selection increased with age for b) central and c) 1-boundary trials. However, there was no relationship between age and performance in the d) 2-boundaries condition.

Figure 4.

Participants’ likelihood of inferring that two members from the same temporal community or two members from different temporal communities shared habitat preferences. Temporal bias scores greater than zero reflect that a participant attributed a character from the same temporal community as sharing a habitat preference as the cued character more often than a character from a different temporal community. Multiple linear regression revealed that temporal bias scores increased with age.

Figure 5.

Relationship between temporal knowledge and temporal bias during inference. a) Across all participants, inference bias can be predicted from participants’ ability to identify familiar character sequences (targets) during the temporal knowledge task. However, the relationship between temporal bias during inference and temporal sequence knowledge varied with age. While b) younger children (7-9 years), c) older children (10-12 years), and d) adolescents (13-15 years) showed no relationship between temporal bias and temporal knowledge, temporal knowledge was predictive of the degree of temporal bias observed during inference in e) adults.