Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning about novel objects not only involves noticinginformation that makes the object unique, but also what makesobjects the same. Yet, these two levels of learning involvedifferent pieces of information, meaning that learning one wellcould come at the cost of the other. Moreover, children maycategorize in a fundamentally different way, resulting in theselevels of learning interacting differently. To investigate this,we had adults and children perform a categorization taskfollowed by an item recognition test. We found that adultsshowed a trade-off, such that the ability to categorize itemscame at the cost of memory for those items. Using a subset ofmore unique lures, children’s memory trended towards a trade-off with category learning. However, this was only observedamong the older children. This suggests that adults’ efficientlearning comes at a cost, and this trade-off may start to appearin the elementary school years.