CONSTRUCTING EVENT REPRESENTATIONS - BUILDING ON A FOUNDATION OF VARIATION AND ENABLING RELATIONS

Similarities in the patterns of recall of events by 1- to 2-year-olds and 3- to 8-year-olds suggest continuity in the organization of event representations across an impressively wide developmental span. However, two abilities of older children have heretofore not been assessed in children under 3: the ability to recall long, temporally complex events, and the ability to generalize knowledge of an event over different instantiations. In the present study, 30-month-olds' ability to remember long event sequences, and their ability to incorporate novel props into their recall, was tested. Children enacted the same four event sequences in each of sessions. Each of the sequences was a complex mixture of enabling and arbitrary temporal relations. Additionally, at each session, some of the props used to enact some of the sequences were changed. The children accurately remembered substantial portions of the events after only a single experience; they had better recall for the enabling-relation portions of the events. By the third testing session they showed clear evidence of generalization: They spontaneously incorporated the novel props into their recall. The results suggest that like older children, children under 3 rapidly form generalized representations of temporally complex events.