Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Event Segmentation Theory suggests that people naturally divide everyday experiences into distinct units, with event boundaries serving as anchors in long-term memory and aiding recall. These boundaries are ubiquitous in children’s daily experiences and may significantly influence learning. This study investigated how event boundaries affect novel category learning in young children. Specifically, 23 English-speaking three-year-olds learned novel object categories under two conditions. In the event boundary condition, objects were moved across two different background contexts, whereas in the control condition, they remained within the same backgrounds. We hypothesized that presenting objects across an event boundary would enhance generalization. Unexpectedly, both conditions yielded similar performance. An order effect emerged, with initially introduced categories showing better performance, suggesting the impact of task structure and children’s differing interpretations of event boundaries, particularly among females. This finding opens avenues for further investigation into the role of event boundaries in early category learning.