ABSTRACT
Two experiments investigate the ability of four-year-old children to spontaneously process relations as well as elements in an immediate recognition task. The experiments also test predictions of a model proposed to account for differential processing of elements and relations. Both experiments used a two-item forced-choice task. In each experiment, children accurately recognized the target, regardless of whether distracter items included different elements or different relations. The results of these experiments suggest that young children do spontaneously process relations as well as elements. These findings in conjunction with earlier results also suggest that more pronounced privileged processing for elements may not arise from initial encoding, but rather from events which occur later in processing such as recoding to a long-term memory representation, or retrieval from long-term memory.
