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Category learning in adults but not children benefits from delayed introduction of exceptions

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

Jessie Song¹ (), Frida Printzlau¹, Sagana Vijayarajah¹, Dana Huang¹, Stephanie Cardillo¹, Margaret L. Schlichting¹, Michael L. Mack¹; ¹University of Toronto

Grouping information into meaningful categories allows us to generalize past knowledge to new experiences. But not everything conforms to existing category rules (e.g penguins are birds but cannot fly). The hippocampus is thought to play a key role in category learning by both extracting category regularities and rapidly storing details of such rule-violating "exceptions”. Prior research shows that category learning in adults benefits from delayed introduction of exceptions, potentially because rule violations are easier to detect after category rules are well-established. However, during development, the hippocampal pathways thought to support exception learning mature more slowly than those that extract regularities, suggesting that children may not benefit from delayed exception introduction to boost learning in the same way as adults. In this study, children (7-9 years) and adults completed a rule-plus-exception category learning task in which exceptions were introduced either at the start of learning (early) or only after many repetitions of category-consistent items (late). We found a reliable age group difference between children and adults on exception performance, with adults but not children benefitting from late exception introduction. Interestingly, within the child age range, only older children showed an adult-like advantage from delayed exceptions, highlighting 7-9 as a potentially important developmental window for the maturation of exception learning. These results align with neural network model simulations of the hippocampus, which show that learning to categorize exceptions relies on later-maturing pattern differentiation processes. More broadly, our findings underscore the importance of aligning a learning curriculum to the learner’s neurodevelopmental state.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging