My future self: Young children's ability to anticipate and explain future states

Time and Narrative: An Investigation of Storytelling Abilities in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study analyzed the relation between mental time travel (MTT) and the ability to produce a storytelling focusing on global coherence, which is one of the most notable characteristics of narrative discourse. As global coherence is strictly tied to the temporal sequence of the events narrated in a story, we hypothesized that the construction of coherent narratives would rely on the ability to mentally navigate in time. To test such a hypothesis, we investigated the relation between one component of MTT—namely, episodic future thinking (EFT)—and narrative production skills by comparing the narratives uttered by 66 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with those produced by 66 children with typical development. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas storytelling production skills were assessed by administering two narrative production tasks that required children to generate future or past episodes with respect to the target stimuli. The results showed that EFT skills were impaired only in a subgroup of children with ASD and that such subgroup performed significantly worse on the narrative production task than ASD participants with high EFT skills and participants with typical development. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Expectations about recipients' prosociality and mental time travel relate to resource allocation in preschoolers

Previous studies have revealed that preschoolers selectively allocate their resources based on their social relationship with recipients such as friendship. In this investigation, we investigated how expectations about recipients' prosociality and the ability of future thinking relate to the selective allocation of resources. In Study 1, participants aged 3.5-6 years chose how to allocate resources from two ways (selfish allocation, where only the participants could receive stickers, and equal allocation, where the participants and recipients receive get the same number of stickers) in costly and non-costly situations with three recipients (friend, peer, and stranger). Participants were asked to state which alternatives the recipients would choose if they were given a choice. The results showed that children aged 5 and 6 years tended to choose equal allocation of resources when they expected the recipients to do the same both in costly and non-costly situations. This tendency was not observed in children aged 3.5 and 4 years. In Study 2, the relationships between selectivity in non-costly allocation and two facets of future thinking (delay of gratification and mental time travel) were investigated in children aged 5 and 6 years. The results suggested that children with a higher mental time travel ability tended to be more selective in allocating resources based on social relationships; they tended to allocate more resources to the friend and fewer to the peer. Our findings suggest that expectations about a recipient's prosociality and the ability of mental time travel affect selectivity of resource allocation in children aged 5 and 6 years.

The development of episodic future thinking in middle childhood

The ability to imagine future events (episodic future thinking-EFT) emerges in preschoolers and further improves during middle childhood and adolescence. In the present study, we focused on the possible cognitive factors that affect EFT and its development. We assessed the ability to mentally project forward in time of a large cohort of 135 6- to 11-year-old children through a task with minimal narrative demands (the Picture Book Trip task adapted from Atance and Meltzoff in Cogn Dev 20(3):341-361. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2005.05.001, 2005) in order to avoid potential linguistic effects on children's performance. The results showed that this task can be used to assess the development of EFT at least until the age of 8. Furthermore, EFT scores correlated with measures of phonological short-term and verbal working memory. These results support the possibility that cognitive factors such as working memory play a key role in EFT.

Perspectives of future health in self and others: The moderating role of culture

People tend to perceive themselves more favourably than others, but the degree to which individuals exhibit this bias may be influenced by cultural upbringing. Korean (n = 271) and American (n = 503) participants were asked to evaluate current and future health expectations for themselves and others. Results showed that American participants rated their own future health more positively than others' future health, whereas Korean participants rated their own and others' future health similarly. Given its role in patient health behaviour, implications for creating context-sensitive interventions for future health expectations are discussed.

'Will I want these stickers tomorrow?' Preschoolers' ability to predict current and future needs

Between 3 and 5 years of age, children develop the ability to plan for their own and others' future needs; however, they have great difficulty predicting future needs that conflict with current ones. Importantly, this ability has only been tested in the domain of physiological states (e.g., thirst). Therefore, it is still an open question whether in a different context preschoolers can disengage from their current needs to secure a different future one. In a Resource Allocation task, 4- and 5-year-olds had to distribute three types of rewards between themselves and another child for either 'right now' or 'tomorrow'. Children's current needs were manipulated by providing them (or not) with their preferred reward at beginning of the task. Only 5-year-olds could predict future needs that conflict with their current ones and act accordingly. Younger children's performance is discussed in the context of temporal and social distance. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? By the age of 4, children can plan for their own and others' future needs. Seven-year-old children still have difficulty predicting future physiological needs that conflict with their current ones. What does this study add? In a Resource Allocation task, preschoolers had to share rewards with another child for 'right now' or 'tomorrow'. Children's current needs were manipulated by providing them (or not) with their preferred reward. This study shows that 5-year-olds can predict future (non-physiological) needs that conflict with their current ones.

The Effect of Psychological Distance on Children's Reasoning about Future Preferences

Young preschool-aged children often have difficulty thinking about the future, but tend to reason better about another person’s future than their own. This benefit may reflect psychological distance from one’s own emotions, beliefs, and states that may bias thinking. In adults, reasoning for others who are more socially distant (i.e., dissimilar, unfamiliar other) is associated with wiser and more adaptive reasoning. The current studies examined whether this effect of social distance could be demonstrated in young children’s future thinking. In a future preferences task, 3- and 4-year-olds were shown 5 pairs of child and adult items and selected which ones they would prefer when grown-up. Children answered for themselves, a socially close peer, or a socially distant peer. Social distance was manipulated by varying similarity in Study 1 and familiarity in Study 2. In Study 1, reasoning for similar and dissimilar peers was significantly more accurate than reasoning for the self, but reasoning for similar and dissimilar peers did not differ. In Study 2, scores showed a step-wise increase from self, familiar peer, to unfamiliar peer, but only reasoning for an unfamiliar peer was significantly better more accurate than reasoning for the self. Reasoning for a familiar peer did not differ from reasoning for the self or for an unfamiliar peer. These results suggest that, like adults, children benefit from psychological distance when reasoning for others, but are less sensitive to degrees of social distance, showing no graded effects on performance in Study 1 and weak effects in Study 2. Stronger adult-like effects may only emerge with increasing age and development of other socio-cognitive skills.

Children's planning performance in the Zoo Map task (BADS-C): Is it driven by general cognitive ability, executive functioning, or prospection?

A minimal amount of research has examined the cognitive predictors of children's performance in naturalistic, errand-type planning tasks such as the Zoo Map task of the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome for Children (BADS-C). Thus, the current study examined prospection (i.e., the ability to remember to carry out a future intention), executive functioning, and intelligence markers as predictors of performance in this widely used naturalistic planning task in 56 children aged 7- to 12-years-old. Measures of planning, prospection, inhibition, crystallized intelligence, and fluid intelligence were collected in an individual differences study. Regression analyses showed that prospection (rather than traditional measures of intelligence or inhibition) predicted planning, suggesting that naturalistic planning tasks such as the Zoo Map task may rely on future-oriented cognitive processes rather than executive problem solving or general knowledge.

Understanding deliberate practice in preschool-aged children

Deliberate practice is essential for skill acquisition and expertise and may be a direct consequence of episodic foresight. However, little is known about how deliberate practice develops in children. We present two experiments testing children's ability to selectively practise a behaviour that was going to be useful in future and to reason about the role of practice in skill formation. Five-year-olds demonstrated an explicit understanding of deliberate practice both in selectively choosing to practise a future-relevant skill and in predicting skill change in others based on their practice. Four-year-olds showed some capacities, but failed to demonstrate consistent understanding of the relationship between practice and skill improvement. Children's understanding of this relationship was significantly related to their understanding of how information leads to knowledge, suggesting that both may draw on similar cognitive developmental changes.

The better part of not knowing: Virtuous ignorance

Suppose you are presented with 2 informants who have provided answers to the same question. One provides a precise and confident answer, and the other says that they do not know. If you were asked which of these 2 informants was more of an expert, intuitively you would select the informant who provided the certain answer over the ignorant informant. However, for cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable (e.g., the number of leaves on all the trees in the world), certainty and confidence indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this "virtuous ignorance" as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found that adults and children older than 9 years selected confident informants for knowable information and ignorant informants for unknowable information. However, 5-6-year-olds overwhelmingly favored the confident informant, even when such certainty was completely implausible. In Experiment 2 we replicated the results of Experiment 1 with a new set of items focused on predictions about the future, rather than numerical information. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that 5-8-year-olds and adults are both able to distinguish between knowable and unknowable items when asked how difficult the information would be to acquire, but those same children failed to reject the precise and confident informant for unknowable items. We suggest that children have difficulty integrating information about the knowability of particular facts into their evaluations of expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record

The emergence of cognitive short-term planning : performance of preschoolers in a problem-solving task

The aim of this study is to identify patterns of the cognitive planning process of young children emerging in the context of a problem solving task. Using a complex dynamic systems approach, this paper depicts the main features of cognitive planning in the short term. Participants were 45 preschool children (aged 3.5 and 3.6 years) of which two case studies are described in detail. The microgenetic method was used to capture, in two months, the planning process in real time during six sessions of data collection. Thus, 96 measuring points were obtained for each child of the sample. The instrument used was a problem solving task in a virtual format, which requires the development of a plan to attain the goal. The first part of the analysis characterizes the children’s planning performance by means of cluster analysis. Two clusters were identified as a result of this analysis. In order to illustrate the performance of the sample, one child from each cluster was randomly selected as a case study. The second part of the analysis describes the two case studies. The State Space Grids (SSG) technique was used to show the short-term emergence of cognitive planning. Results of the case studies revealed two types of performance: a reduction pattern and a stable pattern of cognitive planning. These patterns indicate the ability of children to integrate the constraints of the task and consider future states in their actions. In contrast to the literature, the findings of this study reveal the resources in planning skills of preschoolers, such as self-regulation of actions aimed at attaining a goal and anticipation of future states.

False belief understanding and "cool" inhibitory control in 3-and 4-years-old Italian children

During preschool years, major developments occur in both executive function and theory of mind (ToM), and several studies have demonstrated a correlation between these processes. Research on the development of inhibitory control (IC) has distinguished between more cognitive, “cool” aspects of self-control, measured by conflict tasks, that require inhibiting an habitual response to generate an arbitrary one, and “hot,” affective aspects, such as affective decision making, measured by delay tasks, that require inhibition of a prepotent response. The aim of this study was to investigate the relations between 3- and 4-year-olds’ performance on a task measuring false belief understanding, the most widely used index of ToM in preschoolers, and three tasks measuring cognitive versus affective aspects of IC. To this end, we tested 101 Italian preschool children in four tasks: (a) the Unexpected Content False Belief task, (b) the Conflict task (a simplified version of the Day–Night Stroop task), (c) the Delay task, and (d) the Delay Choice task. Children’s receptive vocabulary was assessed by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test. Children’s performance in the False Belief task was significantly related only to performance in the Conflict task, controlling for vocabulary and age. Importantly, children’s performance in the Conflict task did not significantly correlate with their performance in the Delay task or in the Delay Choice task, suggesting that these tasks measure different components of IC. The dissociation between the Conflict and the Delay tasks may indicate that monitoring and regulating a cool process (as flexible categorization) may involve different abilities than monitoring and regulating a hot process (not touching an available and highly attractive stimulus or choosing between a smaller immediate option and a larger delayed one). Moreover, our findings support the view that “cool” aspects of IC and ToM are interrelated, extending to an Italian sample of children previous findings on an association between self-control and ToM.

Brief report: episodic foresight in autism spectrum disorder

Episodic foresight (EpF) or, the ability to imagine the future and use such imagination to guide our actions, is an important aspect of cognition that has not yet been explored in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is despite its proposed links with theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF), two areas found to be impaired in ASD. Twenty-five children with ASD (M = 5 years, 10 months; 22 male) and 25 mental-age-matched typically developing children (M = 4 years, 10 months; 22 male) completed a series of EpF, ToM, and EF tasks. Significant group differences were detected on several EpF tasks suggesting that children with ASD show impairments in thinking about their future selves.

Ways of thinking: from crows to children and back again

This article reviews some of the recent work on the remarkable cognitive capacities of food-caching corvids. The focus will be on their ability to think about other minds and other times, and tool-using tests of physical problem solving. Research on developmental cognition suggests that young children do not pass similar tests until they are at least four years of age in the case of the social cognition experiments, and eight years of age in the case of the tasks that tap into physical cognition. This developmental trajectory seems surprising. Intuitively, one might have thought that the social and planning tasks required more complex forms of cognitive process, namely Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind. Perhaps the fact that children pass these tasks earlier than the physical problem-solving tasks is a reflection of cultural influences. Future research will hope to identify these cognitive milestones by starting to develop tasks that might go some way towards understanding the mechanisms underlying these abilities in both children and corvids, to explore similarities and differences in their ways of thinking.

What will I like best when I'm all grown up? Preschoolers' understanding of future preferences

Three experiments investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 240) understanding that their future or "grown-up" preferences may differ from their current ones (self-future condition). This understanding was compared to children's understanding of the preferences of a grown-up (adult-now condition) or the grown-up preferences of a same-aged peer (peer-future condition). Children's performance across all three conditions improved significantly with age. Moreover, children found it significantly more difficult to reason about their own future preferences than they did to reason either about an adult's preferences or the future preferences of a peer. These results have important implications for theories about future thinking and perspective-taking abilities, more broadly.

From memory to prospection: what are the overlapping and the distinct components between remembering and imagining?

Reflecting on past events and reflecting on future events are two fundamentally different processes, each traveling in the opposite direction of the other through conceptual time. But what we are able to imagine seems to be constrained by what we have previously experienced, suggesting a close link between memory and prospection. Recent theories suggest that recalling the past lies at the core of imagining and planning for the future. The existence of this link is supported by evidence gathered from neuroimaging, lesion, and developmental studies. Yet it is not clear exactly how the novel episodes people construct in their sense of the future develop out of their historical memories. There must be intermediary processes that utilize memory as a basis on which to generate future oriented thinking. Here, we review studies on goal-directed processing, associative learning, cognitive control, and creativity and link them with research on prospection. We suggest that memory cooperates with additional functions like goal-directed learning to construct and simulate novel events, especially self-referential events. The coupling between memory-related hippocampus and other brain regions may underlie such memory-based prospection. Abnormalities in this constructive process may contribute to mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

How do episodic and semantic memory contribute to episodic foresight in young children?

Humans are able to transcend the present and mentally travel to another time, place, or perspective. Mentally projecting ourselves backwards (i.e., episodic memory) or forwards (i.e., episodic foresight) in time are crucial characteristics of the human memory system. Indeed, over the past few years, episodic memory has been argued to be involved both in our capacity to retrieve our personal past experiences and in our ability to imagine and foresee future scenarios. However, recent theory and findings suggest that semantic memory also plays a significant role in imagining future scenarios. We draw on Tulving’s definition of episodic and semantic memory to provide a critical analysis of their role in episodic foresight tasks described in the developmental literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions of research that could further our understanding of how both episodic memory and semantic memory are intimately connected to episodic foresight.

The reality of the past versus the ideality of the future: emotional valence and functional differences between past and future mental time travel

Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backward or forward in time in order to remember an event from one's personal past or to imagine a possible event in one's personal future. Past and future MTT share many similarities, and there is evidence to suggest that the two temporal directions rely on a shared neural network and similar cognitive structures. At the same time, one major difference between past and future MTT is that future as compared to past events generally are more emotionally positive and idyllic, suggesting that the two types of event representations may also serve different functions for emotion, self, and behavioral regulation. Here, we asked 158 participants to remember one positive and one negative event from their personal past as well as to imagine one positive and one negative event from their potential personal future and to rate the events on phenomenological characteristics. We replicated previous work regarding similarities between past and future MTT. We also found that positive events were more phenomenologically vivid than negative events. However, across most variables, we consistently found an increased effect of emotional valence for future as compared to past MTT, showing that the differences between positive and negative events were larger for future than for past events. Our findings support the idea that future MTT is biased by uncorrected positive illusions, whereas past MTT is constrained by the reality of things that have actually happened.

Comparison of diachronic thinking and event ordering in 5- to 10-year-old children

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the emergence and refinement of diachronic thinking and event ordering in children and to document significant development in these skills during middle childhood. The current study investigated the relationship between performance on tasks of diachronic thinking and event ordering in 90 children (5;0–10;10) to determine whether these tasks tap overlapping cognitive processes. Specifically, we examined the extent to which the various measures were inter-correlated and related to measures of language and intelligence. A principal-components analysis yielded two factors. Factor 1 was positively associated with all measures, including age, language, and intelligence. Factor 2 (uncorrelated with age, language, and intelligence) distinguished the synthesis task from spatial and labeling tasks. Overall, results suggest that diachronic thinking and event ordering are not unified constructs. Rather, the multiple measures designed to assess these constructs tap into somewhat different ways of keeping track of time, and are distinguished by the extent to which they rely on knowledge of conventional time patterns and require flexibility in manipulating and synthesizing temporal sequences. Implications for how researchers conceptualize and assess time concepts are discussed and directions for future research are outlined.

Episodic future thinking as a predictor of children's prospective memory

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship among retrospective memory, episodic future thinking, and event-based prospective memory performance in preschool, first-grade, and second-grade children. A total of 160 children took part in the experiment. The study included participants from four age groups: 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and 7-year-olds. Participants were administered a recognition memory task, a task to test the ability to pre-experience future events, and an event-based prospective memory task. Data were submitted to correlational analyses, analyses of variance (ANOVAs), and logistic regression analyses. Results showed that, overall, all of these abilities improve with age and are significantly correlated with one another. However, when partialling out age and retrospective memory, episodic future thinking and prospective memory performance remained correlated. Logistic regression further showed that age and episodic future thinking abilities were significant predictors of prospective memory performance independent of retrospective memory abilities.

Episodic future thinking in children compared to adolescents

Episodic thinking involves the ability to re-create past and to construct future personal events, which contain event-specific (episodic) and general (semantic) details. The richness of episodic thought for past events improves as children move into adolescence. The current study aims to examine changes in episodic future thinking and to establish the cognitive underpinning of these changes. Typically developing children (n = 14) and adolescents (n = 15) were tested using an adapted version of the Child Autobiographical Interview (CAI) that required generation of past and future personally relevant events. Relational memory and executive skills were also examined. Significant developmental gains were found in richness of events recall across temporal directions (past and future) and across different types of details (episodic and semantic). Developmental gains in richness of past events were also shown to correspond to developmental gains in generation of future events. Moreover, developmental changes in relational memory and (to a lesser extent) executive functions were found to relate to increases in the amount of episodic (but not semantic) details provided. Our study highlighted the similarities between past and future episodic thinking in typically developing children and adolescents. It also raises a possibility that children with developmental and neurological disorders with impaired relational memory and/or executive skills may be at risk of difficulties with episodic thinking.

Assessing the role of memory in preschoolers' performance on episodic foresight tasks

A total of 48 preschoolers (ages 3, 4, and 5) received four tasks modelled after prior work designed to assess the development of "episodic foresight". For each task, children encountered a problem in one room and, after a brief delay, were given the opportunity in a second room to select an item to solve the problem. Importantly, after selecting an item, children were queried about their memory for the problem. Age-related changes were found both in children's ability to select the correct item and their ability to remember the problem. However, when we controlled for children's memory for the problem, there were no longer significant age-related changes on the item choice measure. These findings suggest that age-related changes in children's performance on these tasks are driven by improvements in children's memory versus improvements in children's future-oriented thinking or "foresight" per se. Our results have important implications for how best to structure tasks to measure children's episodic foresight, and also for the relative role of memory in this task and in episodic foresight more broadly.

The development of mental scenario building and episodic foresight

Episodic foresight is the future-directed counterpart of episodic memory. It is a sophisticated, potentially uniquely human capacity, with tremendous adaptive consequences. Here we review what is currently known about its development through early childhood. We tackle this from two distinct perspectives. First, we present the first systematic evaluation of the development of purported components of mental scenario building as highlighted by a theater metaphor: the stage, the playwright, the set, the actors, the director, the executive producer, and the broadcaster. We find that, although there are diverse developmental trajectories, by 4 years of age children have acquired the basic cognitive components required to mentally construct specific future events. Second, we examine recent attempts to test children's episodic foresight more directly and find that results are in line with those examining the development of required components. This is not to say that children younger than four have no inkling of upcoming events or that older children have nothing left to learn about constructing the future. Episodic foresight, and its neurocognitive foundations, continues to develop throughout childhood.

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

Previous experiments have demonstrated that by 4 years of age children can use information from a past episode to solve a problem for the very next future episode. However, it remained unclear whether 4-year-olds can similarly use such information to solve a problem for a more removed future episode that is not of immediate concern. In the current study we introduced 4-year-olds to problems in one room before taking them to another room and distracting them for 15 min. The children were then offered a choice of items to place into a bucket that was to be taken back to the first room when a 5-min sand-timer had completed a cycle. Across two conceptually distinct domains, the children placed the item that could solve the deferred future problem above chance level. This result demonstrates that by 48 months many children can recall a problem from the past and act in the present to solve that problem for a deferred future episode. We discuss implications for theories about the nature of episodic foresight.

Thinking about the future early in life: the role of relational memory

The constructive episodic simulation hypothesis suggests that we imagine possible future events by flexibly recombining details of past experiences to produce novel scenarios. Here we tested this hypothesis by determining whether episodic future thinking is related to relational memory ability during the preschool years. Children (3- to 5-year-olds) were asked to remember a past event and imagine a possible future event using an adapted version of the recombination paradigm. Relational learning and inference were assessed using a task adapted from the neuroimaging literature. The results show that preschoolers were able to describe both past and possible future events; however, they produced more specific episodic details in relation to past events relative to future events. Episodic future thinking performance was correlated with performance on the relational inference task, consistent with the idea that the ability to flexibly recombine relational knowledge is critical in episodic future thinking.

Self-development

The self is a multifaceted and complex construct. Each facet of the self and the interrelations between them are examined to understand 'what is self.' The neurocognitive, social, and cultural mechanisms underlying the development of self as extended in time and as a meaning system are further examined to understand how children come to acquire a sense of who they are. This includes when and how young children attain cognitive self-awareness, remember past experiences and imagine future happenings, and acquire a cultural self. The final analysis focuses on the executive function of the self with regard to how children come to emotionally react to and regulate the self. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1187 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.