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Sketchpad Series 

How do children represent the world? Examining representational similarity for repeated and related stimuli in children and adults

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Bailey Agard¹, Amy S. Finn¹; ¹University of Toronto

The proposed study aims to elucidate potential differences in how children and adults represent repeatedly seen items versus different items presented in the same context using representational similarity analysis (RSA). Behavioural work from our lab with children and adults has found that repetition gives adults a comparatively greater memory boost when recognizing previously seen items, yet also greater difficulty in discriminating between perceptually similar items. In adults, a greater difference between same-item and across-item pattern similarity has been shown to be larger for subsequently remembered compared to forgotten items in areas within the dorsal visual stream, medial temporal pole, and inferior frontal gyrus. Further, within-participant global similarity—the degree of similarity between representations of different items presented in the same experimental context—may indicate better memory. However, due to children’s tendency to encode stimuli in highly variable ways and underdeveloped ability to integrate related stimuli during learning it is currently unclear whether we would expect similar integration-like global similarity signals in children. Similarly, children may also show a smaller difference between same-item and across-item similarity levels if they do not represent repetitions of the same item as similarly as adults. Thus, participants will be shown some repeating and non-repeating items before testing their memory for old, similar, and completely novel items. In this Sketchpad Poster, we hope to elicit feedback on our planned analyses for single-trial RSA estimates to understand differences in how adults and children represent related and repeated experiences, and if this provides insight to our novel behavioural findings.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic