Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In both adults and school-age children, volitional controlover the presentation of stimuli during study leads to en-hanced recognition memory. Yet little is known abouthow very young learners choose to allocate their timeand attention during self-directed study. Using a recog-nition memory task, we investigate self-directed study inlow-income preschoolers, who are at an age when atten-tion, memory, and executive function skills rapidly de-velop and learning strategies emerge. By pre-exposingchildren to some items before self-directed study, weaimed to discover how familiarity modulates their studystrategies. We found that children showed a preferencefor studying pre-exposed items. Overall, items stud-ied longer led to increased recognition of those items attest. We also compared recognition task performanceand strategies with measures of cognitive control skills,finding that children’s selective attention skills supportrecognition performance. These findings may informboth theory and educational intervention.