Encoding of Elements and Relations of Object Arrangements by Young Children

Two experiments investigate the ability of four-year-old children to spontaneously process relations as well as elements in an immediate recognition task. The experiments also test predictions of a model proposed to account for differential processing of elements and relations. Both experiments used a two-item forcedchoice task. In each experiment, children accurately recognized the target, regardless of whether distracter items included different elements or different relations. The results of these experiments suggest that young children do spontaneously process relations as well as elements. These findings indicate that previous findings of privileged processing for elements occurs during recoding of items into a long term memory code, or during a retrieval stage, but not during initial encoding.