Developmental changes in active learning of transitive relations

Combining memories of related experiences is fundamental to the formation of generalizable knowledge. Past work has shown that the ability to integrate and reason about related events improves across childhood. However, little work has examined developmental changes in the ability to actively construct new relational knowledge by making decisions about how to study related materials. We used a transitive inference (TI) task to examine the active construction of relational knowledge in 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 107). We find that age-related improvements in relational inference are accompanied by an increasing preference for "chained" study, such that overlapping relations are studied in consecutive trials. Using computational models of transitive inference, we show that these developmental changes are consistent with a growing tendency to link individual relations together into a single mental structure while learning. This process is facilitated when children study premises in chained sequences. These findings suggest that exploratory study behaviors that promote relational reasoning emerge late in childhood, developing alongside the capacity to maintain and manipulate more complex mental representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).