Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the particular sequence in which the shapes occurred and/or their group‐level structure. After accounting for developmental improvements in overall memory, all ages remembered specific transitions, while memory for group membership was only observed in older children and adults (age by test‐type interaction η2 = .05). Thus, while young children form memories for specifics of structured experience, memory for derived associations is refined later—underscoring that adults and young children form different memories despite identical experience.

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways-as in when drawing inferences.However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on children's learning mechanisms, or rather their deployment of suboptimal strategy. Here, 7-9-year-old children (N = 154) and young adults (N = 130) first formed strong memories for initial (AB) associations and then engaged in one of three learning strategies as they viewed overlapping (BC) pairs. We found that being told to integrate-combine ABC during learning-both significantly improved children's ability to explicitly relate the indirectly associated A and C items during inference and protected the underlying pair memories from forgetting. However, this finding contrasted with implicit evidence for memory-to-memory connections: Adults and children both formed A-C links prior to any knowledge of an inference test-yet for children, such links were most apparent when they were told to simply encode BC, not integrate. Moreover, the accessibility of such implicit links differed between children and adults, with adults using them to make explicit inferences but children only doing so for well-established direct AB pairs. These results suggest that while a lack of integration strategy may explain a large share of the developmental differences in explicit inference, children and adults nevertheless differ in both the circumstances under which they connect interrelated memories and their ability to later leverage those links to inform flexible behaviours.

As early as infancy, humans extract patterns from structured input, and demonstrate the ability to distinguish between reliably experienced patterns and new ones. However, the nature of memories that support these behaviors—and how their structure might change across childhood—remains unknown. Here, we ask what children and adults remember after exposure to a continuous stream of shapes: the particular sequence in which the shapes occurred, their higher-level group structure, or both? We showed 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N=211) a stream of shapes comprising three triplets (groups of three shapes) that always occurred in a fixed order, followed by an old-new memory test including lure sequences that matched the exposure stream on a particular dimension (e.g., group structure). Given the early emergence of simple associative memories that increase in complexity over development, we predicted that the youngest children in our sample would remember specific shape-shape sequences, while older children and adults would additionally represent groups. After accounting for developmental improvements in overall memory, we found all ages were sensitive to specific transitions: Participants responded “old” to lures with intact shape-shape transitions at above-baseline levels. In contrast, order-independent group memory—as measured by “old” responses to shuffled triplets—was only observed in older children and adults. Our results show that while young children form memories for specific aspects of a structured experience, memory for commonalities across events is refined later—underscoring that even after identical experiences, adults and young children form different memories for those events.