Cristina M. Atance

Future Thinking in Young Children

The study of future thinking is gaining momentum across various domains of psychology. Mentally projecting the self forward in time (i.e., mental time travel) is argued to be uniquely human and of vital importance to the evolution of human culture. Yet it is only recently that developmentalists have begun to study when, and how, this capacity emerges. I begin by outlining the concept of mental time travel, along with newly developed methodologies to test childrens ability to mentally project the self into the future. Data suggest that this ability is in place by ages 4 or 5 but also reveal conditions under which children may experience difficulty accurately predicting their future desires. I conclude by discussing how the research on childrens mental time travel can be used to further our understanding of the development of future-oriented behaviors, including planning and delaying gratification.

Preschoolers' Current Desires Warp Their Choices for the Future

We introduce a new paradigm to assess how childrens choices for the future are influenced by their current desires. Forty-eight 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assigned to one of four conditions. In two of these conditions (intervention), we manipulated childrens current state of thirst by allowing them to eat pretzels. In the remaining two conditions (baseline), we did not give them pretzels. The children were then asked to choose between water and pretzels. In one intervention and one baseline condition, they chose what they would like “now,” whereas in the other intervention and baseline conditions, they chose what they would like “tomorrow.” Results revealed that, despite childrens overwhelming desire for pretzels in the baseline conditions, children in both intervention conditions chose water. The data support the notion that childrens current state influences not only their choices for the present, but also their choices for the future. We discuss this finding in terms of both cognitive-developmental and adult social-cognitive theory.

The SISAP: A New Screening Instrument for Identifying Potential Opioid Abusers in the Management of Chronic Nonmalignant Pain Within General Medical Practice

BACKGROUND: Many physicians are overly cautious about prescribing opioids for chronic pain because of fears of iatrogenic addiction. However, in patients with chronic pain, addiction to opioid analgesics is exceedingly rare when there is no prior history of alcohol or drug abuse.

Preschoolers’ talk about future situations:

We conducted 2 experiments that examined 3-year-olds’ ability to talk about future situations involving the self. In both experiments, children participated in a trip task. In this task, children were asked to choose various items that might be required on a trip, and to explain their choices verbally. A coding scheme that captured both the dimensions of futurity and uncertainty was developed to categorize children’s explanations. In addition, children were administered the Test of Early Language Development-2 (TELD-2) (Hresko, Reid & Hammill, 1991). Results from both experiments indicated that children’s language was beginning to reflect an ability to anticipate various situations involving the self that might arise during the course of a trip. The correlation between children’s scores on the trip task and their scores on the TELD-2 was positive, but not statistically significant. We discuss factors, other than general language ability, that may contribute to children’s talk, and thought, about the future.

A Comparison of Preschoolers' Memory, Knowledge, and Anticipation of Events

This study examined the development of the episodic and semantic memory systems, with an emphasis on the emergence of the two aspects of the former: episodic memory (the ability to re-experience a past event) and episodic future thinking (the ability to pre-experience a future event). Three-, 4-, and 5-year olds were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: past, semantic, or future. Children were asked questions about the same eight events, phrased in past, generalized present, or future tense. Half of these events were ones for which parents rated their children as having a high level of control (or input) over how the event unfolds, whereas the other half were rated as “low control.” Responses were scored with respect to their specificity and accuracy. Results revealed age differences in childrens accuracy scores across all three conditions. Childrens episodic future thinking and episodic memory, but not semantic memory, were less accurate for low-control events compared with high-control events. These results offer a new perspective on the development of the episodic and semantic memory systems and the methods used to assess them.

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 childrens ability to select the correct item and their ability to remember the problem. However, when we controlled for childrens 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 childrens performance on these tasks are driven by improvements in childrens memory versus improvements in childrens future-oriented thinking or “foresight” per se. Our results have important implications for how best to structure tasks to measure childrens episodic foresight, and also for the relative role of memory in this task and in episodic foresight more broadly.

Preschoolers' Understanding of Others' Desires: Fulfilling Mine Enhances My Understanding of Yours.

We developed a gift-giving task requiring children to identify their mothers desire, when her desire differed from theirs. We found a developmental change: 3- and 4-year-olds performed more poorly than 5-year-olds (Experiment 1). A modified version of this task (Experiment 2) revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds whose desires had been fulfilled chose an appropriate gift for their mothers significantly more often than children whose desires were unfulfilled. Children who merely anticipated desire fulfillment also outperformed children whose desires were unfulfilled. Analysis of childrens verbal explanations provides converging evidence that desire fulfillment enhanced childrens tendency to adopt the perspective of their mother and justify their choices by referencing her desires. Discussion focuses on why desire fulfillment enhances childrens ability to consider the desires of others.

Remembering in tool-use tasks in children and apes: The role of the information at encoding

Providing adults with relevant information (knowledge that they will be tested at some future time) increases motivation to remember. Research has shown that it is more effective to have this information prior to, rather than after, an encoding phase. We investigated this effect in apes and children in the context of tool-use tasks. In Experiment 1 we presented chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos with two tool-use tasks and three different two-tool sets. We had two conditions: prospective (PP) and retrospective (RP). In the PP subjects were shown the task that they would have to solve before they were shown the tools with which they could solve it. In the RP this order was reversed. Apes remembered the location of the useful tool better in the PP than in the RP. In Experiment 2 we presented 3- and 4-year-olds with the same conditions. Both age groups remembered the location of the correct tool in the PP, but only the 4-year-olds did so in the RP. Thus providing apes and preschool children with relevant information prior to, rather than after, the encoding phase enhances memory. These results have important implications for the understanding of the evolution of memory in general, and encoding mechanisms in particular.

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.

Chapter 1.7 From the past into the future: the developmental origins and trajectory of episodic future thinking

Abstract In this chapter I approach the topic of future thinking from a developmental perspective. I first consider the emergence of various behaviors, including acts of planning and prospective memory, believed to reflect future thinking. These behaviors seem to emerge between 3 and 5 years of age and thus signal a shift in the childs cognitions about the future. However, these behaviors may not fully reflect the processes involved in a special type of future thinking termed episodic future thinking (Atance and O’Neill, 2001). Episodic future thinking is defined as the ability to project the self into the future to preexperience an event. This type of thinking may best be captured by the childs ability to act in the present in anticipation of a future state. Studies that test this capacity are reviewed, and it is concluded that it begins to emerge between 3 and 4 years of age.