A novel test of flexible planning in relation to executive function and language 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.

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.

New Caledonian crows plan for specific future tool use

The ability to plan for future events is one of the defining features of human intelligence. Whether non-human animals can plan for specific future situations remains contentious: despite a sustained research effort over the last two decades, there is still no consensus on this question. Here, we show that New Caledonian crows can use tools to plan for specific future events. Crows learned a temporal sequence where they were (a) shown a baited apparatus, (b) 5 min later given a choice of five objects and (c) 10 min later given access to the apparatus. At test, these crows were presented with one of two tool-apparatus combinations. For each combination, the crows chose the right tool for the right future task, while ignoring previously useful tools and a low-value food item. This study establishes that planning for specific future tool use can evolve via convergent evolution, given that corvids and humans shared a common ancestor over 300 million years ago, and offers a route to mapping the planning capacities of animals.