Russell James, Alexis Dean, Clayton Nicola
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
Cognition. 2010 Jan;114(1):56-71. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.013. Epub 2009 Sep 24.
Assessing children's episodic future thinking by having them select items for future use may be assessing their functional reasoning about the future rather than their future episodic thinking. In an attempt to circumvent this problem, we capitalised on the fact that episodic cognition necessarily has a spatial format (Clayton & Russell, 2009; Hassabis & Maguire, 2007). Accordingly, we asked children of 3, 4, and 5 to chose items they would need to play a game (blow football) from the opposite side of the table on which they had never before played. The crucial item was the box that was needed by children to reach the table from the other side. Over four experiments, we demonstrated that, while children of 3 perform poorly on future questions and children of 5 generally perform quite well, children of 4 years find a question about what they themselves will need to play in the future harder to answer than a similar question posed about another child. We suggest that this result is due to the 'growth error' of over-applying newly-developed Level 2 perspective-taking skills (Flavell et al., 1981), which encourages the selection of non-functional items. The data are discussed in terms of perspective-taking abilities in children and of the neural correlates of episodic cognition, navigation, and theory of mind.
通过让儿童选择未来使用的物品来评估他们的情景未来思维，可能评估的是他们对未来的功能性推理，而非他们的情景未来思维。为了规避这个问题，我们利用了情景认知必然具有空间形式这一事实（克莱顿和拉塞尔，2009；哈萨比斯和马奎尔，2007）。因此，我们让3岁、4岁和5岁的儿童从他们从未在上面玩过的桌子对面选择玩游戏（吹足球）所需的物品。关键物品是孩子们从另一边够到桌子所需的盒子。在四项实验中，我们证明，虽然3岁儿童在未来问题上表现不佳，5岁儿童总体表现相当好，但4岁儿童发现关于自己未来玩游戏需要什么的问题比关于另一个孩子的类似问题更难回答。我们认为，这一结果是由于过度应用新发展的二级观点采择技能（弗拉维尔等人，1981）的“成长错误”，这会促使他们选择非功能性物品。我们从儿童的观点采择能力以及情景认知、导航和心理理论的神经关联方面对数据进行了讨论。
