Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to represent recursive structures is thought to be foundational for language, music, mathematics, complex tooluse, and theory of mind. However, we do not currently know what type of computational machinery is used to representrecursive structures, or when this ability develops. Here we measure the developmental trajectory in young childrenusing a sequence generation task. We also test two proposed mechanisms for representing these structures: a stack-likedata structure a first-in-last-out structure in which only the last item can be accessed, and a queue-like data structurean ordered list that can only be accessed from its beginning. Each of these mechanisms make different predictions forwhat types of sequential structures should be easier to generate and have specific item-by-item response time signatures.We show evidence that both children and adults use a queue-like representational system which iteratively runs forwardssearches through a stored queue.