Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

From the earliest ages testable, children and adults show similar mean-levels of implicit social attitudes. Nevertheless,meaningful change may exist in how attitudes are acquired across the lifespan. This project explored developmental changein implicit attitude formation by comparing the separate and joint effects of two learning modalities: evaluative statements(ES; purely verbal information about upcoming stimulus pairings) and repeated evaluative pairings (REP; exposure topairings of category members with valenced images). Like adults (N=2,198, Mage=37 years), children (N=281, Mage=9years) rapidly formed robust implicit attitudes towards novel groups following ES and ES+REP interventions. Unlikeadults, children showed no learning following REP. Follow-up studies suggest that inattention to category membership orstimulus valence are unlikely to account for no learning in REP. These findings demonstrate the early-emerging power ofverbal instructions to create implicit attitudes, while also revealing developmental change in the capacity for supposedlylow-level associative learning.