Development of conditional learning abilities in children from 3 to 12 years of age

This study investigated the typical development of unconditional learning, conditional learning, and transitive inference abilities. Seventy-one 3–12-year-old children and twenty-two 20–30-year-old adults were tested on touchscreen tasks: a visual learning task assessing the ability to learn unconditional relationships between two stimuli (A > B, C > D), a 3-item conditional learning task (A > B, B > C), and a 5-item conditional learning task (A > B, B > C, C > D, D > E) often used to assess transitive inference. Detailed analyses of individual performance for different learning and test pairs revealed that half of the 3–5.5-year-old children and most older participants exhibited unconditional learning. Although some children exhibited conditional learning from 5 years of age, the majority did not until 7.5 years. Surprisingly, 3–12-year-old children did not exhibit transitive inference abilities, in contrast to 20–30-year-old adults. Our findings support the theory that the development of conditional learning and transitive inference abilities depends on late-developing brain structures including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.