2-184 - Cognitive and Social Factors that Impact Children's Future Thinking

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The past decade has seen a burst of research on humans’ capacity to think about the future. Although this capacity improves between ages 3 and 5, we still know little about the factors that influence its development, or about its trajectory into later childhood; the two main issues that we tackle in this symposium. Paper 1 uses a novel paradigm to explore the mechanisms by which 3- and 4-year-olds’ future event construction is intimately connected to their memory for the past. Paper 2 focuses on the notion of “conflict,” with the intriguing finding that 3- to 7-year-olds’ predictions about the future are more accurate for “other” than “self,” but only in contexts in which there is a high degree of conflict between current and future states. Further extending this self vs. other difference, Paper 3 shows that 4- to 11-year-olds and adults are more likely to make incorrect judgments about the likelihood of desirable future events when they are reasoning about self compared to another person, and that such errors are related to inhibitory control. The final paper highlights that although the fundamental capacity to think about the future is influenced by such factors as age and language, the content of children’s narratives about the future varies as a function of maternal styles of imaging the future and broader cultural beliefs. Together, these findings not only shed light on the development of future thinking ability but, importantly, on underlying mechanisms that affect both the accuracy and content of children’s predictions.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Cristina Atance, University of Ottawa

• Caitlin E V Mahy, Brock University

Individual Presentations

• Access to a Temporally Connected Event Structure Facilitates Future Event Construction - Presenting Author: Janani Prabhakar, UC Davis; Judith A Hudson, Rutgers University

• The Effect of Psychological Distance on the Development of Episodic Foresight in Early Childhood - Presenting Author: Caitlin E V Mahy, Brock University; Cristina Atance, University of Ottawa; Louis J Moses, University of Oregon; Leia Kopp, University of Ottawa

• Desirability Biases Forecasting for Self more than Others: Contributions of Age and Inhibitory Control - Presenting Author: Kristin Hansen Lagattuta, University of California, Davis; Hannah Jean Kramer, Univ of California, Davis; Liat Sayfan, UC Davis

• Learning to Mentally Travel in Time: The Influence of Narrative Interaction in Cultural Contexts - Presenting Author: Qi Wang, Cornell University; Jessie Bee Kim Koh, Cornell University