Setting boundaries: Children's neural and behavioral event cognition is robust but still developing in early childhood

Abstract

Segmenting our ongoing experience into events is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and memory. Prior work in adults has shown that we naturally and spontaneously parse our experience along event boundaries, both behaviorally and neurally, and that this is reflected in event memory as well. With this project, we aimed to examine whether children ages 4-7 also spontaneously track events while encoding naturalistic stimuli, whether they can behaviorally demarcate event boundaries, and how this influences their memory for events. Our results indicate that children can segment naturalistic stimuli into events like adults, but they do so with more variability, and their boundaries differ from adults’ boundaries in terms of both location and consistency. Children’s behaviorally- delineated boundaries were also reflected in a separate group of children’s neural data, when examined both from a hypothesis driven and a data driven approach, indicating that young children’s brains track events during perception. Last, we found that children’s event segmentation grows more adult-like across early childhood, and that children who segment events more like adults may have better memory for those events. Overall, this study suggests that children’s event cognition and memory is robust even at very young ages, but that it is still developing across early childhood and becomes more adult-like as children age.