Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adults parse continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentationin turn colors how experiences are construed content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state,which is then dropped after an event boundary. However, little is known about whether children are similarly influencedby event boundaries. Here, we tested seven- to nine-year-old childrens and adults recognition of objects experienced eitherwithin or across event boundaries of two cartoons. We found that children and adults were both more accurate and fasterto correctly recognizing objects that last occurred within events than across an event boundary. We, however, additionallyobserved an interaction such that childrens 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 less reliablyshapes the active contents of childrens minds than adults.