Tomorrow versus a year from now: Do children represent the near and distant future differently?

Adults represent the near future more concretely and vividly than the distant future, with important implications for future-oriented behavior (e.g., planning, self-control). Although children are adept at describing future events at around 5 years of age, we know little about how temporal distance (i.e., "near" vs "distant") affects their future event representations. In a series of three experiments, we sought to determine the effects of temporal distance, age, and event frequency on children's future event representations. Participants, 5- to 9-year-olds, were asked to describe frequent (e.g., snack) and infrequent (e.g., party) events, with half of children imagining that these events would happen in the near future and the other half imagining that they would happen in the distant future. We investigated the effect of temporal distance on numerous event representation indicators (e.g., clarity, details, pronouns), all theoretically grounded in previous literature. Although children perceived near events as closer in time than distant events (Experiments 2 and 2b) and temporal distance affected the clarity of event representations (Experiment 2), most indicators were not affected by temporal distance. In contrast, event frequency (examined in Experiment 1) played an important role in children's event representations, with infrequent events being described more concretely than frequent events. Results suggest that young children may begin perceiving differences in temporal distance but that this does not translate to their event representations (e.g., clarity, pronouns) until later in development. Implications for children's future thinking and future research are discussed.

Using an episodic specificity induction to improve children's future thinking.

Episodic future thinking (EFT) is the ability to subjectively pre-experience a specific future event. Future-oriented cognition in young children positively predicts physical health and financial status later in life. Can EFT be improved in children, even temporarily? Developmental research emphasizes the importance of thinking about one's own near future to enhance EFT, whereas research in adults suggests benefits reside in constructing a richly detailed event. We bridged the two perspectives to examine whether a procedure, the "episodic specificity induction" (ESI), could be adapted to encourage an episodic mode of thinking in children, benefitting performance on a variety of subsequent EFT tasks. The present study implemented a child-friendly ESI in which children mentally simulated a future event and were probed for specific details about it. We randomly assigned 66 children aged 6 and 7 years to one of two conditions: (1) ESI, in which children imagined "having breakfast tomorrow" in detail, describing surroundings, people, and actions, or (2) a Control condition (i.e., no construction), in which children simply viewed and described a picture of another child having breakfast. Children then completed a series of future thinking tasks assessing prospective memory, recollection/imagination of events, delay of gratification, and planning. Our ESI was successful in promoting the construction of a detailed event, and subsequently increasing the number of details of recollected and imagined events on an outcome task as compared to a control condition. Nonetheless, the effect of ESI was smaller than expected - a finding that fits with recent work suggesting that such interventions may be too cognitively taxing for young children and/or that benefits may hinge on further development in episodic processes. We discuss possible modifications to the induction and implications for EFT amelioration in young children.

Moving beyond "Spoon" tasks: When do children autocue their episodic future thought?

Much developmental (and comparative) research has used Tulving's Spoon test (i.e., whether an individual will select an item needed to solve a future problem) as the basis for designing tasks to measure episodic future thinking, defined as the capacity to mentally pre-experience the future. There is, however, intense debate about whether these tasks successfully do so. Most notably, it has been argued that children may pass (i.e., select an item with future utility) by drawing on non-episodic, associative processes, rather than on the capacity to represent the future, per se. Although subsequent developmental tasks have sought to address this limitation, we highlight what we argue is a more fundamental shortcoming of Spoon tasks: they prompt future-directed action making it impossible to determine whether children have used their episodic future thinking to guide their behavior. Accordingly, we know little about children's thought about the future that is independently generated (i.e., without prompting), or autocued, and is subsequently reflected (and measurable) by children's actions. We argue that this capacity is a critical, and heretofore overlooked, transition in future-oriented cognition that may not occur until middle childhood. We further hypothesize that it is reliant on children developing richer and more detailed future event representations, along with the necessary cognitive control to transform these representations into actions that serve to benefit their future selves. The time is ripe for researchers to explore this aspect of cognitive development and we suggest several novel approaches to do so. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development.

What will you want tomorrow? Children-But not adults- mis-predict another person's future desires.

Young children have difficulty predicting a future physiological state that conflicts with their current state. This finding is explained by the fact that children are biased by their current state (e.g., thirsty and desiring water) and thus have difficulty imagining themselves in a different state (e.g., not thirsty and desiring pretzels) "tomorrow," for example. Another potential explanation that we explore here is that young children have difficulty understanding how physiological states, like thirst, fluctuate over time. We asked 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) to predict what a thirsty Experimenter-who preferred crisps to water-would want ("water" or "crisps") "right now" and "tomorrow." Only adults correctly predicted someone else's future desires when this person's future and current desires conflicted. In contrast, both adults and children in the control groups (in which the Experimenter was not thirsty) had no difficulty predicting that the Experimenter would want crisps "right now" and "tomorrow." Our findings suggest that children's difficulty predicting future desires cannot solely be attributed to their being biased by their current state since the children in our study were, themselves, not thirsty. We discuss our results in the context of children's difficulty understanding fluctuations in physiological states.

Young children's future-oriented reasoning for self and other: Effects of conflict and perspective.

Young children reason more adaptively about the future (e.g., predicting preferences and delaying gratification) when they are asked to think about another person's perspective versus their own perspective. An explanation for this "other-over-self" advantage is that in contexts where current (e.g., small reward now) and future (e.g., larger reward later) desires conflict, adopting the perspective of another person provides psychological distance and hence more adaptive decision making by reducing conflict. We tested this hypothesis in 158 preschoolers using a battery of representative future-oriented reasoning tasks (Preferences, Delay of Gratification, Picture Book, and "Spoon") in which we varied the perspective children adopted (self or other) and the level of conflict between current and future desires (high or low). We predicted that perspective and conflict would interact such that children would benefit most from taking the perspective of "other" when conflict was high. Although results did not support this hypothesis, we found significant effects of conflict; children reasoned more optimally on our low-conflict task condition than on our high-conflict task condition, and these differences did not appear to be related to inhibitory control. The effect of conflict was most marked in younger preschoolers, resulting in Age × Conflict interactions on two of our four tasks. An other-over-self advantage (i.e., perspective effect) was detected on the Preferences task only. These results add to the growing body of literature on children's future thinking by showing the important role of conflict (and its interaction with age) in the accuracy with which children reason about the future.

Tomorrow will be different: Children's ability to incorporate an intervening event when thinking about the future.

Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved based solely on representations of the present. To overcome this limitation, we modified an existing task such that children could not simply rely on a representation of the present to succeed (i.e., the correct answer for "right now" was different than the correct answer for "tomorrow"). A sample of 117 4- to 7-year-olds (64 girls and 53 boys) from Ottawa, Canada, and surrounding area, who were predominantly European Canadian (78.6% of sample) and had a family income of over $100,000 CAN (66.1% of sample) participated. Children remembered the information required to solve our task, and there were age-related changes in performance, but only 7-year-olds made an adaptive future-oriented decision significantly more often than chance. With the task modification removed (so the correct answer for the present and the future was the same), even 4-year-olds were above chance. Our work challenges the notion that starting at age 4, children solve behavioral tasks of future thinking by acting on their representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Are all distances created equal? Insights from developmental psychology.

Gilead et al.'s theory presupposes that traversing temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distances are largely interchangeable acts of mental travel that co-occur in human ontogeny. Yet, this claim is at odds with recent developmental data suggesting that children's reasoning is differentially affected by the dimension which they must traverse, and that different representational abilities underlie travel across different dimensions.

"What Should You Bring with You to This Place?": Examining Children's Episodic Foresight Using Open-Ended Questions.

Children's episodic foresight, the ability to mentally project oneself into the future to pre-experience an event (e.g., Atance & O'Neill, 2005), begins to emerge early in the preschool years. Results from the Picture-book task (Atance & Meltzoff, 2005) have shown that children are generally capable of selecting an item needed in the future (from provided options), but young preschoolers have difficulty justifying their choice with future-oriented explanations. Because episodic foresight has typically been measured using forced-choice questions (such as the Picture-book task) less is known about children's more naturalistic and "open-ended" future thinking (i.e., more spontaneous forms of episodic foresight). Forty-eight 3-to 5-year-olds completed a new, open-ended version of the Picture-book task. Using a descriptive approach, we found that children were able to generate an appropriate item to bring with them to a future location, and that this ability improved with age. Temporal focus as well as internal (episodic) and external (semantic) details were explored in the context of children's explanations. Children's explanations were mostly present-oriented and included episodic and semantic details equally. Our findings extend our knowledge of children's episodic foresight by highlighting children's ability to solve future-oriented problems in an open-ended manner.

Scrutinizing the grey areas of declarative memory: Do the self-reference and temporal orientation of a trait knowledge task modulate the Late Positive Component (LPC)?

Knowledge about the future self may engage cognitive processes typically ascribed to episodic memory, such as awareness of the future self as an extension of the current self (i.e., autonoetic awareness) and the construction of future events. In a prior study (Tanguay et al., 2018), temporal orientation influenced the Late Positive Component (LPC), an ERP correlate of recollection. The LPC amplitude for present traits was intermediate between semantic and episodic memory, whereas thinking about one's future traits produced a larger LPC amplitude that was similar to episodic memory. Here, we examined further the effect of temporal orientation on the LPC amplitude and investigated if it was influenced by whether knowledge concerns the self or another person, with the proximity of the other being considered. Participants verified whether traits (e.g., Enthusiastic) were true of themselves and the "other," both now and in the future. Proximity of the other person was manipulated between subjects, such that participants either thought about the typical traits of a close friend (n = 31), or those of their age group more broadly (n = 35). Self-reference and temporal orientation interacted: The LPC amplitude for future knowledge was larger than for present knowledge, but only for the self. This effect of temporal orientation was not observed when participants thought about the traits of other people. The proximity of the other person did not modify these effects. Future-oriented cognition can engage different cognitive processes depending on self-reference; knowledge about the personal future increased the LPC amplitude unlike thinking about the future of other people. Our findings strengthen the notion of self-knowledge as a grey area between semantic and episodic memory.

The roles of perspective and language in children's ability to delay gratification.

Increasing psychological distance is an established method for improving children's performance in a number of self-regulation tasks. For example, using a delay of gratification (DoG) task, Prencipe and Zelazo (Psychological Science, 2005, Vol. 16, pp. 501-505) showed that 3-year-olds delay more for "other" than they do for "self," whereas 4-year-olds make similar choices for self and other. However, to our knowledge, no work has manipulated language to increase psychological distance in children. In two experiments, we sought to manipulate psychological distance by replicating Prencipe and Zelazo's age-related findings and extending them to older children (Experiment 1) and also sought to manipulate psychological distance using the auxiliary verbs "want" and "should" to prime more impulsive preference-based decisions or more normative optimal decisions (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, 96 3- to 7-year-olds showed age-related improvements and interactive effects between age and perspective on DoG performance. In Experiment 2, 132 3- to 7-year-olds showed age-related improvements and a marginal interaction between age and perspective on DoG performance, but no effect of auxiliary verbs was detected. Results are discussed in terms of differing developmental trajectories of DoG for self and other due to psychological distancing, and how taking another's perspective may boost DoG in younger children but not older children.

An advantage for ownership over preferences in children's future thinking.

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their future preferences with judgments about their future ownership. In Experiment 1, we show that 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 120) exhibit an ownership advantage in their future thinking-they are better able to indicate which objects they will own as adults than to indicate which they will prefer. We propose 2 explanations for this finding. First, children may rely more heavily on their semantic knowledge when inferring ownership than when inferring preferences, allowing them to sidestep the difficult task of mentally projecting themselves into the future. Second, ownership inferences may involve less conflict than preference inferences (e.g., conflict between a child's present and future desires). In Experiment 2, we test these accounts by comparing 3-year-olds' (N = 120) judgments about their own future ownership and preferences with judgments about what a present adult owns and prefers. We replicate the ownership advantage from Experiment 1 and further find that the ownership advantage holds when reasoning about a present adult. Our findings therefore support the conflict account, suggesting children struggle to infer what they will prefer as adults because their present and future preferences are in conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Thinking about the future: Comparing children's forced-choice versus "generative" responses in the "spoon test".

One of the most popular methods to assess children's foresight is to present children with a problem (e.g., locked box with no key) in one room and then later, in another room, give them the opportunity to select the item (e.g., key) that will solve it. Whether or not children choose the correct item to bring back to the first room is the dependent measure of interest in this "spoon test." Although children as young as 3 or 4 years typically succeed on this test, whether they would pass a more stringent version in which they must verbally generate (vs. select) the correct item in the absence of any cues is unknown. This is an important point given that humans must often make decisions about the future without being explicitly "prompted" by the future-oriented option. In Experiment 1, using an adapted version of the spoon test, we show that as the "generative" requirements of the task increase, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 99) performance significantly decreases. We replicate this effect in Experiment 2 (N = 48 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) and also provide preliminary evidence that the capacity to verbally generate the correct item in a spoon test may draw more heavily on children's category fluency skills than does their capacity to select this item among a set of distracters. Our findings underscore the importance of examining more generative forms of future thought in young children.

Predicting our own and others' future preferences: The role of social distance.

People underestimate how much their preferences will change in the future, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as a "presentism bias." Recently, we found that this presentism bias is attenuated when thinking about the preferences of other people. The aim of this study was to investigate whether predicting future preferences also differs depending on the level of social distance between self and other. A total of 67 participants completed a perspective-taking task in which they were required to think about their own preferences, those of a generic peer, and those of a close other both now and in the future. They were also asked to consider the preferences of an older adult now. Participants predicted less change between their current and future preferences than between the current and future preferences of a generic peer. Predicted change in preferences for a close other were similar, but not identical, to those made for the self. When considering relevant future preferences, participants predicted less change for themselves than for their close others and less change for close others than for generic peers. In other words, as social distance increases, the presentism bias decreases. Interestingly, participants estimated that both they and their peers would not change so much that they become similar to current older adults. Simulating the future perspectives of a generic peer or, even better, the current perspectives of an older adult may thus result in improved long-term decision-making, as it may enable a more realistic estimation of the magnitude of likely changes in the future.

Children's behavior and spontaneous talk in a future thinking task.

We explored 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 120) "explicit" and "spontaneous" future-oriented cognition. Specifically, children had to think ahead to meet a future physiological need (desire for food) or psychological need (avoiding boredom). One group of children alternated between a room with candy and a room without candy, spending 3 min per visit. Children were explicitly asked which room they wanted to put extra candy in for a future visit to the lab (correct answer: room without candy). A second group of children underwent the same procedure but with toys as the resource instead of food (a replication of Atance et al. in J Exp Child Psychol 129:98-109, 2015). In the food condition, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds all placed candy in the correct room above chance, but only 4- and 5-year-olds were above chance in the toy condition. Overall, 4- and 5-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds, and children performed better in the food condition than the toy condition. Children's spontaneous (or "involuntary") future thinking was assessed by coding their utterances while in the two rooms. Children who solved the explicit task uttered more task-relevant future and past statements than children who failed. Examining spontaneous talk also allowed us to explore children's spontaneous "solving" of the task before being asked an explicit test question. This research highlights the importance of varying stimuli in future thinking tasks and developing methods to capture spontaneous/involuntary future thinking in young children.

Adults' Performance in an Episodic-Like Memory Task: The Role of Experience.

Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect personal past events. This type of memory has been tested in non-human animals by using depletion paradigms that assess whether they can remember the "what," "where," and "when" (i.e., how long ago) of a past event. An important limitation of these behavioral paradigms is that they do not clearly identify the cognitive mechanisms (e.g., episodic memory, semantic memory) that underlie task success. Testing adult humans in a depletion paradigm will help to shed light on this issue. In two experiments, we presented university undergraduates with a depletion paradigm which involved choosing one of two food snacks-a preferred but perishable food and a less preferred but non-perishable food-either after a short or a long interval. Whereas, in Experiment 1, participants were asked to imagine the time between hiding the food items and choosing one of them; in Experiment 2 participants experienced the time elapsed between hiding the food items and choosing one of them. In addition, in Experiment 2 participants were presented with 2 trials which allowed us to investigate the role of previous experience in depletion paradigms. Results across both experiments showed that participants chose the preferred and perishable food (popsicle) after the short interval but did not choose the less preferred and non-perishable food (raisins) after the long interval. Crucially, in Experiment 2 experiencing the melted popsicle in Trial l improved participants' performance in Trial 2. We discuss our results in the context of how previous experience affects performance in depletion tasks. We also argue that variations in performance on "episodic-like memory" tasks may be due to different definitions and assessment criteria of the "when" component.

"Will I know more in the future than I know now?" Preschoolers' judgments about changes in general knowledge.

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess-for example, that when they are grown-ups, they will know what the words on a newspaper say. We also compared this understanding to children's understanding that adults have knowledge that children do not. To address the possibility that children's correct responses stemmed from a general rule that "adults know everything," we also included questions to which adults could not know the answer. Results show that children's understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess and that adults possess knowledge that children do not improves substantially during the preschool years. Moreover, only the 5-year-olds in our study acknowledged that certain things are "unknowable," even by adults. Finally, children's performance did not differ as a function of whether they were asked about their own future knowledge or an adult's current knowledge. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of perspective-taking and mental state reasoning, future thinking, and children's motivation to learn. (PsycINFO Database Record

'Things aren't so bad!': Preschoolers overpredict the emotional intensity of negative outcomes.

Adults often overpredict the emotional intensity of future events, but little is known about whether this 'intensity bias' is present in early childhood. We asked 48 3- to 5-year-olds to (1) predict and (2) report their emotions concerning two desirable (receiving four stickers, scoring up to two points in a ball toss) and two undesirable (receiving one sticker, scoring no points) outcomes. Children showed the intensity bias by overpredicting how negatively they would feel if they received one sticker, but not for scoring no points. We discuss how task factors (e.g., personal volition) and cognitive mechanisms (e.g., immune neglect) may influence children's tendency to show the intensity bias. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Adults tend to overpredict the intensity of their emotional reactions to future events. Whether similar 'affective forecasting' errors characterize preschoolers' predictions is not known. What does this study add? We created two forecasting tasks ('sticker' and 'ball') with both desirable and undesirable outcomes. We obtained evidence for a 'negativity' but not a 'positivity' bias in children's predictions. On the sticker task, children overpredicted how badly they would feel after receiving one, versus, four stickers.

A new approach to measuring patience in preschoolers.

Patience in children has usually been studied using delay of gratification paradigms. However, another important aspect of patience that has not been well documented is the ability to adjust one's behavior while waiting without an explicit reward as a motivator (e.g., sitting in the doctor's waiting room). To examine this aspect of patience, video-recordings of sixty-one 3- and 4-year olds waiting for two separate 3-min periods were examined and coded for children's spontaneous behaviors. We found that 4-year olds displayed more patient (i.e., staying still) behaviors than 3-year olds during this "waiting paradigm." Interestingly, we also found that children who displayed less patient behaviors during the waiting paradigm were also those who succeeded on a future-thinking task. These findings have important implications for measuring patience in young children and highlight the potential impact of spontaneous behaviors on children's performance in cognitive tasks such as those assessing future-oriented cognition.

Testing the validity of a continuous false belief task in 3- to 7-year-old children.

In two studies, we examined young children's performance on the paper-and-pencil version of the Sandbox task, a continuous measure of false belief, and its relations with other false belief and inhibition tasks. In Study 1, 96 children aged 3 to 7years completed three false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, and Appearance/Reality) and two inhibition tasks (Head-Shoulders-Knees-Toes and Grass/Snow). Results revealed that false belief bias-a measure of egocentrism-on the Sandbox task correlated with age but not with the Unexpected Contents or Appearance/Reality task or with measures of inhibition after controlling for age. In Study 2, 90 3- to 7-year-olds completed five false belief tasks (Sandbox, Unexpected Contents, Appearance/Reality, Change of Location, and a second-order false belief task), two inhibition tasks (Simon Says and Grass/Snow), and a receptive vocabulary task (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test). Results showed that false belief bias on the Sandbox task correlated negatively with age and with the Change of Location task but not with the other false belief or inhibition tasks after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. The Sandbox task shows promise as an age-sensitive measure of false belief performance during early childhood and shows convergent and discriminant validity.