Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Episodic memory proves fragile and undergoes a protracted development, as it often requires a combination of multiple elements, during which interference occurs as different sets of learned information partially overlap. One way of preventing interference is a complex representation that links together multiple components of an experience (i.e., three-way binding between items and context). The present study aimed to examine the developmental trajectory of the ability to form complex memory structures. Seventeen 5-year-olds and 26 adults participated in this study and performed a memory task that required binding two items to a context. The results showed that adults were able to form three-way binding; however, 5-year-olds exhibited difficulties in both three-way binding and binding between two items. Moreover, 5-year-olds did not benefit from extra learning opportunities, indicating that their difficulty in forming complex binding structures did not result from insufficient learning, but from a property of immature episodic memory.