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Chunking in Verbal Learning is Linked to Prefrontal Cortex Development

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

Parker Younger^1,2 (), David Chen³, Noa Ofen^1,2,3; ¹The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, ²Center for Vital Longevity, Dallas, TX, ³Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

Adults tend to review learned material more effectively than children and adolescents, yet the cognitive and neural basis underlying this advantage remains unclear. One contributing factor may be the refinement of mnemonic strategies such as chunking, the grouping of related items into meaningful units to enhance encoding and retrieval. While prefrontal cortex (PFC) maturation is known to support the use of mnemonic strategies across development, few studies have linked age-related PFC structural differences to chunking behavior. With 105 participants (ages 5–25), we examined age differences in chunking behavior across five free recall trials in the California Verbal Learning Test–Children’s Version (CVLT-C). Structural MRI data were obtained from participants and FreeSurfer segmentation was used to estimate PFC cortical thickness. Chunking differed by age such that adults more effectively integrated components of prior chunks into larger chunks across successive free recall trials (F(6,330)=4.10, p<.001). Notably, this measure of chucking ability was negatively correlated with cortical thickness in the left caudal middle frontal cortex (r=-.28, p<.05) and the right rostral middle frontal cortex (r=-.28, p<.05). Follow up examination in narrow age groups revealed that these associations were significant in adults (r=-.39, p<.05; r=-.41, p<.05 respectively), but not in children and adolescents. Taken together, these findings suggest that adults utilize chunking as an effective mnemonic strategy to encode information into fewer but larger chunks. This ability appears linked to PFC maturation, which supports goal-directed learning and strategic organization—cognitive processes that are less developed in children and adolescents.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory