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

The impact of strategies on young children's saving for the future

The ability to save resources for future use, or saving, begins to emerge around 3 years of age, but children show low rates of saving during the preschool years. Thus, several strategies have been used to improve preschoolers' saving, such as providing a prompt, budgeting, increasing psychological distance, and simulating the future. The current study investigated (a) the development of saving in early childhood, (b) the impact of several saving strategies on children's saving (i.e., budgeting, tracking expenses, and psychological distance), and (c) whether the effectiveness of the strategies changed with age. Here, 3- to 5-year-old Canadian children (N = 254) completed the Saving Board Game, and their parents completed the saving subscale of the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire. In the Saving Board Game, children were randomly assigned to one of the five strategies: (a) control, (b) budgeting, (c) tracking, (d) adult perspective, or (e) child perspective. An analysis of covariance with age, strategy, and response option order (as a covariate) showed a main effect of age, with 5-year-olds saving more than 3-year-olds. There was no effect of strategy or an interaction between strategy and age on children's token saving. Parent-reported child saving was positively correlated with children's Saving Board Game performance only in the control condition. We consider why these strategies failed to increase children's saving.

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.

Inhibition and cognitive flexibility are related to prediction of one's own future preferences in young British and Chinese children

The ability to shift from current to future perspective is pivotal to future-oriented cognition. With two distinct cultural groups, UK (N = 92) and China (N = 90), we investigated 3 to 5-year-olds' understanding of preference changes occurring within themselves and their peers (another child). We administered a battery of representative tasks of executive function and theory of mind to examine their underlying relationships with children's ability to predict future preferences. British 3-year-olds outperformed Chinese children in predicting future preferences, while no country differences were observed between the 4- and 5-year-olds. Across the UK and China, children were more accurate when predicting for their peers than for themselves. They were also more accurate when their current preferences were identified first, i.e. before answering questions about the future. Chinese children outperformed their British counterparts on inhibition and cognitive flexibility tasks whereas there were no Eastern and Western differences in their theory of mind abilities. After controlling for age and children's knowledge of generic adult preferences, children's performance in the inhibition and cognitive flexibility tasks were significantly correlated with the prediction of their own future preferences, but they were not significantly correlated when predicting for a peer. These results are discussed in relation to the conflicts between multiple perspectives and the cognitive correlates of future-oriented cognition.

Temporal discounting for self and friends in adolescence: A fMRI study

Adolescence is characterized by impulsivity but also by increased importance of friendships. This study took the novel perspective of testing temporal discounting in a fMRI task where choices could affect outcomes for 96 adolescents (aged 10-20-years) themselves and their best friend. Decisions either benefitted themselves (i.e., the Self Immediate - Self Delay' condition) or their friend (i.e., 'Friend Immediate - Friend Delay' condition); or juxtaposed rewards for themselves and their friends (i.e., the 'Self Immediate - Friend Delay' or 'Friend Immediate - Self Delay' conditions). We observed that younger adolescents were more impulsive; and all participants were more impulsive when this was associated with an immediate benefit for friends. Individual differences analyses revealed increased activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex extending in the ventral striatum for immediate relative to delayed reward choices for self. Temporal choices were associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, insula, and ventral striatum, but only activity in the right inferior parietal lobe was associated with age. Finally, temporal delay choices for friends relative to self were associated with increased activity in the temporo-parietal junction and precuneus. Overall, this study shows a unique role of the social context in adolescents' temporal decision making.

What children do while they wait: The role of self-control strategies in delaying gratification

Self-control plays an essential role in children's emotional and behavioral adjustment. A central behavioral indicator of self-control is the ability to delay gratification. Few studies have focused on understanding the heterogeneity of self-control behaviors that underlie children's ability to delay gratification. Therefore, we examined the role of spontaneous self-control behaviors (fidgeting, vocalizations, and anticipation/attentional focus toward a reward) in relation to 5-year old children's delay ability using Mischel's delay task (N = 144; M_age = 5.4 years, SD = 0.29). Latent mixture modeling was used to derive three distinct classes of self-control behaviors observed during the delay task: (1) Passive (low fidgeting, low vocalizations, but moderate anticipation), (2) Active (moderate fidgeting, moderate vocalizations, but high anticipation), and (3) Disruptive (high fidgeting, high vocalizations, and high anticipation). Children in the Passive class were more likely to delay the full task time compared with children in the Active class (odds ratio = 1.50, 95 % confidence interval = 1.28-1.81). There were no other differences in delay ability by self-control class. Children whose level of fidgeting and vocalizations matched their level of anticipation (i.e., Passive and Disruptive regulators) were able to delay more successfully than children who were mostly driven by anticipation (Active regulators). Some variation in children's delay ability and use of self-control strategies was explained by sociodemographic differences, specifically maternal age. Findings suggest probing processes underlying children's self-control to identify potential targets for intervention.

Waiting for the better reward: Comparison of delay of gratification in young children across two cultures

Delay of gratification-a form of self-control-is the ability to forsake immediately available rewards in order to obtain larger-valued outcomes in future, which develops throughout the pre-school years. The majority of previous research in this area has been conducted with Western populations, therefore knowledge of Eastern children's performance is scarcer. Here, utilising on a recently published dataset of British children (n = 61), we further tested delay of gratification in 3 to 5-year-old Chinese children (n = 75) using Bramlett et al.'s (2012) delay choice paradigm. The paradigm was previously used in non-human primates and it featured a mechanized rotating tray that sequentially moves rewards within reach. Additionally, we administered 3 inhibitory control tasks and 1 standardised delay choice task to Chinese pre-schoolers (British children were not tested). We aimed to investigate the influence of culture, reward type and reward visibility on pre-schoolers' ability to delay gratification. We found significant age-related improvements in delay of gratification ability in both countries and children performed better when presented with rewards varying in quality than quantity. Consistent with previous cross-cultural literature, Chinese children showed better overall performance than their British peers when reward visibility was manipulated (though reward visibility itself had no significant effect on performance). There were significant correlations in Chinese children's performance in Bramlett et al.'s (2012) delay choice paradigm and performance in some (though not all tested) inhibitory control tasks. We discuss these results in relation to task demands and the broader social orientation of self-control. We concluded that the intuitive comparative assessment of self-control task taps into children's delay of gratification ability. Our results emphasize the importance of testing for socio-cultural influences on children's cognitive development.

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.

Pretending with realistic and fantastical stories facilitates executive function in 3-year-old children

Fictional stories can affect many aspects of children's behavior and cognition, yet little is known about how they might help or hinder children's executive function skills. The current study investigated the role of story content (fantasy or reality) and mode of engagement with the story (pretense or a non-pretense control) on children's inhibitory control, an important component of early executive function. A total of 60 3-year-olds were randomly assigned to hear a fantastical or realistic story and were encouraged to engage in either pretense or a non-pretense activity related to the story. They then completed the Less Is More task of inhibitory control. Story content had no impact on children's inhibitory control; children performed equally well after hearing a fantastical or realistic story. However, children who engaged in story-related pretend play showed greater inhibitory control than those who engaged in a non-pretense activity. We found no interaction between story content and play engagement type. These results held when controlling for baseline inhibitory control, receptive vocabulary, age, gender, affect, and propensity toward pretense. Therefore, mode of play engagement with a story was more important in promoting children's inhibitory control skills than the degree of realism in the story.