title: Opening the cuebox: the information children and young adults generate and rely on when making inferences from memory.
abstract: We used a cue-generation and a cue-selection paradigm to investigate the cues children (9- to 12-year-olds) and young adults (17-year-olds) generate and select for a range of inferences from memory. We found that children generated more cues than young adults, who, when asked why they did not generate some particular cues, responded that they did not consider them relevant for the task at hand. On average, the cues generated by children were more perceptual but as informative as the cues generated by young adults. When asked to select the most informative of two cues, both children and young adults tended to choose a hidden (i.e., not perceptual) cue. Our results suggest a developmental change in the cuebox (i.e., the set of cues used to make inferences from memory): New cues are added to the cuebox as more cues are learned, and some old, perceptual cues, although informative, are replaced with hidden cues, which, by both children and young adults, are generally assumed to be more informative than perceptual cues.
authors.affiliation: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.|Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.
authors.forename: Azzurra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ruggeri
authors.affiliation: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.|Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
authors.forename: Henrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Olsson
authors.affiliation: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Konstantinos V
authors.initials: KV
authors.lastname: Katsikopoulos
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D041923:Adolescent Development; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D013850:Thinking
keywords: cue generation; inferences; information search