15:00 - 16:30
Submission 532
What Sticks and What Doesn’T: How Do Children Process Irrelevant Information?
Posterwall-16
Presented by: Gülce Akin
Gülce AkinLars-Michael SchöpperTarini SinghChristian FringsYana Fandakova
Department of Psychology, Trier University, Germany
The binding and retrieval in action control framework (Frings et al., 2020) proposes that stimuli, responses, and subsequent effects are bound together into a common representation such that the recurrence of any of these features can trigger the retrieval of the remaining ones. Developmental research suggests that children show stronger but less flexible, or stickier, bindings than adults. With age, children use bindings more efficiently and show less difficulties when features only partially overlap across subsequent trials. Even task-irrelevant features (i.e., distractors) can be bound to responses. Research in adults has shown that such retrieval decreases as distractor similarity across subsequent trials increases (Schöpper et al., 2020; Singh et al., 2016). Little is known about the extent to which comparable distractor effects are present in children. The present study tested the hypothesis that, due to a tendency to overgeneralize, younger children may exhibit greater binding effects at higher distractor dissimilarity than older children and adults. We examined age-related differences in distractor-response bindings in 4- to 10-year-olds (N = 95) and adults (N = 40) performing a two-choice response task. Preliminary results showed no differences in binding effects between children and adults as reflected in response times and both in children and adults, retrieval decreased with increasing distractor dissimilarity. However, this effect was stronger in younger children than in older children. These findings suggest that while effects of binding and retrieval are established early, the efficiency of retrieval possibly continues to develop throughout childhood.