The development of memory selection: When children have better memory than adults

The development of cognitive selectivity focuses primarily on the ability of attentional selection. The current study explored the development of another critical but overlooked selective function—memory selection, by comparing the ability of filtering attended yet outdated information between young children and adults. By adopting a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking technology, Experiments 1-3 consistently showed a “developmental reversal”-like phenomenon that children outperformed adults in reporting the attended yet outdated information. Moreover, this was not caused by the different processing strategy (Experiment 2) or different deployment of attention (Experiment 3) between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed for young children, leading to their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory. This demonstration significantly deepens our understanding of the development of cognitive selectivity, and also has implications for understanding the development of cognitive inhibition and early learning.