Listen up, kids! How mind wandering affects immediate and delayed memory in children.

Mind wandering occurs when attention becomes disengaged from the here-and-now and directed toward internally generated thoughts; this is often associated with poorer performance on educationally significant tasks. In this study, 8- to 9-year-old children (N = 60) listened to audio stories embedded with intermittent thought probes that were used to determine if participants' thoughts were on or off task. The key objective was to explore the impact of probe-caught mind wandering on both immediate and delayed memory retention. Children reported being off task approximately 24% of the time. Most inattention episodes were classified as task-unrelated thoughts (i.e., 'pure' instances of mind wandering, 9%) or attentional failures due to distractions (9%). Higher frequency of mind wandering was strongly associated with poorer memory recall, and task-unrelated thoughts strongly predicted how well children could recall components of the audio story both immediately after the task and after a 1-week delay. This study is the first to demonstrate the impact of mind wandering on delayed memory retention in children. Results suggest that exploring mind wandering in the foundational years of schooling could provide the necessary empirical foundation for the development of practical interventions geared toward detecting and refocusing lapses of attention in educational contexts.

Reward-related episodic future thinking and delayed gratification in children.

Cuing adults to imagine their personal futures enhances prudent choice in delay discounting tasks. However, it has not been established that such cueing also reduces discounting in children. We assessed the effect of episodic future thinking (EFT) on delay of gratification in children using EFT cues specifically related to the rewards on offer. One hundred and thirty-nine 8-12-year-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: (i) EFT (imagine spending money in the future), (ii) Imagine Place (imagine being in a certain place), or (iii) No Cue. They were cued on each trial of two tasks: a delay discounting task with hypothetical monetary rewards and a real delay choice task involving choices between real rewards over real delays (coins that could be swapped for treats). In the delay discounting task, the Imagine Place group showed significantly higher discounting than the other two groups. In the real delay choice task, the Imagine Place group made significantly fewer delayed choices than the EFT group. However, the EFT group did not differ from the No Cue group in either task. The lack of a difference between the EFT and No Cue conditions supports previous findings suggesting children struggle to benefit from EFT cues. Poorer performance of the Imagine Place group suggests that cued imagination is cognitively taxing for children, using up cognitive resources required to delay gratification.

Human Vision Reconstructs Time to Satisfy Causal Constraints.

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, because the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here, we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: In three experiments (N = 607), the experienced event timings were determined by causality in real time. Adult participants viewed a simple three-item sequence, ACB, which is typically remembered as ABC in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, participants' points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite participants' full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by postperceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades.

The link between mind wandering and learning in children.

Mind wandering is a common everyday experience during which attention shifts from the here and now; in adults and adolescents, it is associated with poorer performance in educationally significant tasks. This study is the first to directly assess the impact of mind wandering on memory retention in children before the adolescent period. A sample of 97 children aged 6-11 years engaged in a listening activity, and the frequency of mind wandering was measured using intermittent thought probes. Participants then completed a memory retention test. Children reported mind wandering on ∼25% of the thought probes, and frequency did not increase with age. When controlling for the impact of age and vocabulary skills, mind wandering frequency accounted for a large and significant portion of variance in memory scores. Mind wandering frequency also mediated the relation between children's ratings of topic interest and memory scores. The results indicate that mind wandering can be reliably measured in children and is of educational significance.

Developmental differences in description-based versus experience-based decision making under risk in children.

The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, which provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, which require decisions from past experience, each emphasizing different cognitive demands. Although developmental trends have been investigated for both types of decisions, few studies have compared description-based and experience-based decision making in the same sample of children. In the current study, children (N = 112; 5-9 years of age) completed both description-based and experience-based decision tasks tailored for use with young children. Child temperament was reported by the children's primary teacher. Behavioral measures suggested that the willingness to take a risk in a description-based task increased with age, whereas it decreased in an experience-based task. However, computational modeling alongside further inspection of the behavioral data suggested that these opposite developmental trends across the two types of tasks both were associated with related capacities: older (vs. younger) children's higher sensitivity to experienced losses and higher outcome sensitivity to described rewards and losses. From the temperamental characteristics, higher attentional focusing was linked with a higher learning rate on the experience-based task and a bias to accept gambles in the gain domain on the description-based task. Our findings demonstrate the importance of comparing children's behavior across qualitatively different tasks rather than studying a single behavior in isolation.

Children's understanding of counterfactual and temporal relief in others.

Developmentalists have investigated relief as a counterfactually mediated emotion, but not relief experienced when negative events end-so-called temporal relief. This study represents the first body of work to investigate the development of children's understanding of temporal relief and compare it with their understanding of counterfactual relief. Across four experiments (407 children aged 4-11 years and 60 adults; 52% female), we examined children's ability to attribute counterfactual and temporal relief to others. In Experiment 1, 7- to 10-year-olds typically judged that two characters would feel equally happy despite avoiding or enduring an event that was unpleasant for one character. Using forced-choice procedures, Experiments 2 to 4 showed that a fledgling ability to attribute relief to others emerges at 5 to 6 years of age and that the tendency to make these attributions increases with age. The experiments in this study provide the first positive evidence in the literature as to when children can begin to attribute both counterfactual and temporal instances of relief to others. Overall, there was little evidence for separate developmental trajectories for understanding counterfactual and temporal relief, although in Experiment 4 there was an indication that, under scaffolded contexts, some children find it easier to attribute counterfactual relief rather than temporal relief to others.

More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children.

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children's delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds (N = 132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.

Outcomes versus intentions in fairness-related decision making: School-aged children's decisions are just like those of adults.

The notion of what constitutes fairness has been assumed to change during childhood, in line with a marked shift from outcome-based to intention-based moral reasoning. However, the precise developmental profile of such a shift is still subject to debate. This study sought to determine the age at which the perceived intentions of others begin to influence fairness-related decision making in children (aged 6-8 and 9-11 years) and adolescents (aged 14 and 15 years) in the context of the mini-ultimatum game. The mini-ultimatum game has a forced-choice design, whereby a proposer needs to select one of two predetermined offers that a responder can either accept or reject. Due to these constraints, the procedure measures sensitivity to unfair intentions in addition to unfair outcomes. Participants needed to make judgments about how likely they would be to reject various offers, how fair they judged these offers to be, and the emotion they experienced when thinking about the offers. Contrary to previous published reports, we found that even 6- to 8-year-olds employed a sophisticated notion of fairness that took into account the alternatives the proposer had available. Crucially, decision making did not differ as a function of age. A further, and novel, aim was to trace the developmental origins of temporal asymmetries in judgments ab out fairness by testing the implications of adopting a past or future temporal perspective. Across all ages, we found no evidence that fairness-based decision making varies as a function of temporal location.

When causality shapes the experience of time: Evidence for temporal binding in young children.

It is well established that the temporal proximity of two events is a fundamental cue to causality. Recent research with adults has shown that this relation is bidirectional: events that are believed to be causally related are perceived as occurring closer together in time-the so-called temporal binding effect. Here, we examined the developmental origins of temporal binding. Participants predicted when an event that was either caused by a button press, or preceded by a non-causal signal, would occur. We demonstrate for the first time that children as young as 4 years are susceptible to temporal binding. Binding occurred both when the button press was executed via intentional action, and when a machine caused it. These results suggest binding is a fundamental, early developing property of perception and grounded in causal knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQC_MqjxZQQ.

Becoming Kinder: Prosocial Choice and the Development of Interpersonal Regret.

Three experiments examined children's ability to feel regret following a failure to act prosocially. In Experiment 1, ninety 6- to 7-year-olds and one hundred seven 7- to 9-year-olds were given a choice to donate a resource to another child. If they failed to donate, they discovered that this meant the other child could not win a prize. Children in both age groups then showed evidence of experiencing regret, although not in control conditions where they had not made the choice themselves or their choice did not negatively affect the other child. In Experiment 2, eighty-five 5- to 6-year-olds and one hundred nine 7- to 9-year-olds completed the same task; only the older group showed evidence of regret. In Experiment 3, with one hundred thirty-four 6- to 7-year-olds, experiencing regret was associated with subsequently making other prosocial choices.

Experiencing regret about a choice helps children learn to delay gratification.

Children (6- and 7-year-olds) decided whether to wait for a short delay to win a prize or for a longer period to win a different prize. Those who chose to take their prize after a short delay won two candies but were shown that they would have won four candies if they had waited longer. We measured whether children regretted their choice not to wait. The next day, children were faced with the same choice again. Children who regretted choosing the short delay on Day 1 were more likely to delay gratification on Day 2 than children who had not regretted their previous choice. In a second study, we replicated this finding while controlling for intellectual ability and children's preference for four candies over two candies. This suggests that experiencing regret about a choice not to wait assists children in delaying gratification when faced with the same choice again.

Do children and adolescents have a future-oriented bias? A developmental study of spontaneous and cued past and future thinking.

Previous research has indicated that adults have a future-oriented cognitive bias, one illustration of which is their tendency to report more thoughts about the future than the past during mind-wandering. We examined whether children showed a similar bias, and whether there were any developmental changes in the magnitude of such a bias. Children aged 6-7 and 9-10 years, adolescents, and adults completed two tasks in which they could report either past or future thoughts: a mind-wandering task assessing spontaneous past and future thinking and a cued episodic thinking task in which they were free to describe either past or future events. Only adults showed a future-oriented bias in the mind-wandering task. Participants in all groups were much more likely to describe past events in the cue word task, and the proportion of future events described did not change developmentally. However, more than a third of the youngest age group produced no descriptions at all of future events, which was a significantly larger proportion than in any other age groups, and illustrates the difficulty that some children of this age have with future thinking. Our findings indicate that future-oriented bias and developmental changes in such bias may be task-specific.

Temporal updating, temporal reasoning, and the domain of time.

We focus on three main sets of topics emerging from the commentaries on our target article. First, we discuss several types of animal behavior that commentators cite as evidence against our claim that animals are restricted to temporal updating and cannot engage in temporal reasoning. In doing so, we illustrate further how explanations of behavior in terms of temporal updating work. Second, we respond to commentators' queries about the developmental process through which children acquire a capacity for temporal reasoning and about the relation between our account and accounts drawing similar distinctions in other domains of cognition. Finally, we address some broader theoretical issues arising from the commentaries, concerning in particular the question as to how our account relates to the phenomenology of experience in time, and the question as to whether our dichotomy between temporal reasoning and temporal updating is exhaustive, or whether there might be other forms of cognition or representation related to time not captured by it.

Young children's non-numerical ordering ability at the start of formal education longitudinally predicts their symbolic number skills and academic achievement in maths.

Ordinality is a fundamental feature of numbers and recent studies have highlighted the role that number ordering abilities play in mathematical development (e.g., Lyons et al., ), as well as mature mathematical performance (e.g., Lyons & Beilock, ). The current study tested the novel hypothesis that non-numerical ordering ability, as measured by the ordering of familiar sequences of events, also plays an important role in maths development. Ninety children were tested in their first school year and 87 were followed up at the end of their second school year, to test the hypothesis that ordinal processing, including the ordering of non-numerical materials, would be related to their maths skills both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The results confirmed this hypothesis. Ordinal processing measures were significantly related to maths both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and children's non-numerical ordering ability in their first year of school (as measured by order judgements for everyday events and the parents' report of their child's everyday ordering ability) was the strongest longitudinal predictor of maths one year later, when compared to several measures that are traditionally considered to be important predictors of early maths development. Children's everyday ordering ability, as reported by parents, also significantly predicted growth in formal maths ability between Year 1 and Year 2, although this was not the case for the event ordering task. The present study provides strong evidence that domain-general ordering abilities play an important role in the development of children's maths skills at the beginning of formal education.

Knowing when to hold 'em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children, adolescents and adults.

Regret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience regret in children and adolescents' risky decision-making.

Thinking in and about time: A dual systems perspective on temporal cognition.

We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time - a temporal updating system and a temporal reasoning system - of which the former is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive than the latter, and which are at work alongside each other in adult human cognition. We describe the main features of each of the two systems, the types of behavior the more primitive temporal updating system can support, and the respects in which it is more limited than the temporal reasoning system. We then use the distinction between the two systems to interpret findings in comparative and developmental psychology, arguing that animals operate only with a temporal updating system and that children start out doing so too, before gradually becoming capable of thinking and reasoning about time. After this, we turn to adult human cognition and suggest that our account can also shed light on a specific feature of humans' everyday thinking about time that has been the subject of debate in the philosophy of time, which consists in a tendency to think about the nature of time itself in a way that appears ultimately self-contradictory. We conclude by considering the topic of intertemporal choice, and argue that drawing the distinction between temporal updating and temporal reasoning is also useful in the context of characterizing two distinct mechanisms for delaying gratification.

Children's use of interventions to learn causal structure.

Children between 5 and 8 years of age freely intervened on a three-variable causal system, with their task being to discover whether it was a common cause structure or one of two causal chains. From 6 or 7 years of age, children were able to use information from their interventions to correctly disambiguate the structure of a causal chain. We used a Bayesian model to examine children's interventions on the system; this showed that with development children became more efficient in producing the interventions needed to disambiguate the causal structure and that the quality of interventions, as measured by their informativeness, improved developmentally. The latter measure was a significant predictor of children's correct inferences about the causal structure. A second experiment showed that levels of performance were not reduced in a task where children did not select and carry out interventions themselves, indicating no advantage for self-directed learning. However, children's performance was not related to intervention quality in these circumstances, suggesting that children learn in a different way when they carry out interventions themselves.

The development of regret and relief about the outcomes of risky decisions.

Although a number of studies have examined the developmental emergence of counterfactual emotions of regret and relief, none of these has used tasks that resemble those used with adolescents and adults, which typically involve risky decision making. We examined the development of the counterfactual emotions of regret and relief in two experiments using a task in which children chose between one of two gambles that varied in risk. In regret trials they always received the best prize from that gamble but were then shown that they would have obtained a better prize had they chosen the alternative gamble, whereas in relief trials the other prize was worse. We compared two methods of measuring regret and relief based on children's reported emotion on discovering the outcome of the alternative gamble: one in which children judged whether they now felt the same, happier, or sadder on seeing the other prize and one in which children made emotion ratings on a 7-point scale after the other prize was revealed. On both of these methods, we found that 6- and 7-year-olds' and 8- and 9-year-olds' emotions varied appropriately depending on whether the alternative outcome was better or worse than the prize they had actually obtained, although the former method was more sensitive. Our findings indicate that by at least 6 or 7years children experience the same sorts of counterfactual emotions as adults in risky decision-making tasks, and they also suggest that such emotions are best measured by asking children to make comparative emotion judgments.

Regret and adaptive decision making in young children.

In line with the claim that regret plays a role in decision making, O'Connor, McCormack, and Feeney (Child Development, 85 (2014) 1995-2010) found that children who reported feeling sadder on discovering they had made a non-optimal choice were more likely to make a different choice the next time around. We examined two issues of interpretation regarding this finding: whether the emotion measured was indeed regret and whether it was the experience of this emotion, rather than the ability to anticipate it, that affected decision making. To address the first issue, we varied the degree to which children aged 6 or 7 years were responsible for an outcome, assuming that responsibility is a necessary condition for regret. The second issue was addressed by examining whether children could accurately anticipate that they would feel worse on discovering they had made a non-optimal choice. Children were more likely to feel sad if they were responsible for the outcome; however, even if they were not responsible, children were more likely than chance to report feeling sadder. Moreover, across all conditions, feeling sadder was associated with making a better subsequent choice. In a separate task, we demonstrated that children of this age cannot accurately anticipate feeling sadder on discovering that they had not made the best choice. These findings suggest that although children may feel regret following a non-optimal choice, even if they were not responsible for an outcome, they may experience another negative emotion such as frustration. Experiencing either of these emotions seems to be sufficient to support better decision making.

The development of the experience and anticipation of regret.

Although recent studies have established that children experience regret from around 6 years, we do not yet know when the ability to anticipate this emotion emerges, despite the importance of the anticipation of regret in decision-making. We examined whether children will anticipate they will feel regret if they were to find out in a box-choosing game that, had they made a different choice, they would have obtained a better prize. Experiment 1 replicated Guttentag and Ferrell's study in which children were asked what they hoped was in a non-chosen box. Even 8- to 9-year olds find this question difficult. However, when asked what might make them feel sadder, 7- to 8-year olds (but not younger children) predicted that finding the larger prize in the unchosen box would make them feel this way. In Experiments 2 and 3, children predicted how they would feel if the unchosen box contained either a larger or smaller prize, in order to examine anticipation of both regret and of relief. Although 6- to 7-year olds do experience regret when they find out they could have won a better prize, they do not correctly anticipate feeling this way. By around 8 years, the majority of children are able to anticipate both regret and relief.