School of Psychology, University of Ottawa.
Dev Psychol. 2021 Mar;57(3):376-385. doi: 10.1037/dev0001152. Epub 2021 Feb 4.
Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved based solely on representations of the present. To overcome this limitation, we modified an existing task such that children could not simply rely on a representation of the present to succeed (i.e., the correct answer for "right now" was different than the correct answer for "tomorrow"). A sample of 117 4- to 7-year-olds (64 girls and 53 boys) from Ottawa, Canada, and surrounding area, who were predominantly European Canadian (78.6% of sample) and had a family income of over $100,000 CAN (66.1% of sample) participated. Children remembered the information required to solve our task, and there were age-related changes in performance, but only 7-year-olds made an adaptive future-oriented decision significantly more often than chance. With the task modification removed (so the correct answer for the present and the future was the same), even 4-year-olds were above chance. Our work challenges the notion that starting at age 4, children solve behavioral tasks of future thinking by acting on their representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
未来导向思维在人类中普遍存在，但在儿童中研究具有挑战性。成年人不仅会思考未来，还能够代表与现在不同的未来世界状态。然而，评估未来思维发展的行为任务传统上并不要求儿童这样做，因为大多数任务仅基于对现在的表示就可以解决。为了克服这一限制，我们修改了现有的任务，使得儿童不能仅仅依靠现在的表示来成功（即，“现在”的正确答案与“明天”的正确答案不同）。我们的研究样本包括来自加拿大渥太华及其周边地区的 117 名 4 至 7 岁儿童（64 名女孩和 53 名男孩），他们主要是欧洲裔加拿大籍（样本的 78.6%），家庭收入超过 10 万加元（样本的 66.1%）。儿童记住了解决我们任务所需的信息，并且表现出与年龄相关的变化，但只有 7 岁的儿童比机会更频繁地做出适应性的未来导向决策。去除任务修改（即现在和未来的正确答案相同）后，即使是 4 岁的儿童也高于机会水平。我们的工作挑战了这样一种观点，即从 4 岁开始，儿童通过对未来的表示来解决未来思维的行为任务。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。
