Poster #39 - Spatial Distance and Reasoning About the Future

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Various forms of psychological distancing have been found to improve cognitive processes relevant to daily life. For example, creating a greater sense of distance from one’s current situation leads to better self-control in adults (Fujita & Carnevale, 2012) and improved executive function in children (White & Carlson, 2015). Construal-level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010; Fujita et al., 2006) proposes that greater distance leads to a more abstract construal of the situation, leading to broader perspectives and thus better reasoning. Recently, these distancing effects have been extended to reasoning about the future in both children (e.g., Bélanger et al., 2014) and adults (Renoult et al., 2016). For example, social distance (i.e., reasoning from another person’s perspective compared to one’s own perspective) has improved children’s reasoning about future preferences (e.g., Bélanger et al., 2014; Lee & Atance, 2016). Children tended to predict, for example, that they will prefer Kool-aid over coffee when they are grown up, but this tendency toward “Kool-aid” was less pronounced when predicting what another child their age will prefer as a grown-up (Bélanger et al., 2014). In contrast, spatial distance (reasoning about one’s future from a geographically-distant location) has only been studied in adults and little is known about its effects in children. According to construal-level theory, psychological distances (e.g., temporal, social, spatial) should exert similar effects on cognitive processes such as self-control (Fujita et al., 2006) and evidence supports this notion (Rim et al., 2008; Howell et al., 2014). Thus, the current study sought to examine whether spatial distance also improves children’s future-oriented reasoning. Forty-two 3- to 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of two perspectives: Distant (n = 20), where they began each task by imagining themselves in a far away place, and Control (n = 22), where they simply imagined themselves in their current location. Three tasks assessed future thinking: Preferences (Bélanger et al., 2014; predicting which items they will like best when grown up); Delay of Gratification (Prencipe & Zelazo, 2005; deciding between a smaller reward “now” versus a larger reward “tomorrow”); and Sharing (Smith et al., 2013; deciding how many Smarties to give to a hypothetical child). Although perspective did not affect performance for Preferences (Distant M = 0.25, SD = 0.40; Control M = 0.42, SD = 0.42) or Delay of Gratification (Distant M = 6.00, SD = 3.84; Control M = 6.35, SD = 3.10), a significant effect in the predicted direction emerged for Sharing (number of items shared; Distant M = 5.80, SD = 3.09; Control M = 3.55, SD = 2.54, t(40) = 2.59, p < .05; see Figure 1). Results suggest that effective reasoning about the future may be strengthened by spatial distance in a similar (but perhaps not as strong) manner as social distance. Because reasoning about the future has implications for effective decision-making and self-control, these results add an important component to our knowledge about the development of future-oriented thinking in early childhood.

Authors

• Joshua L. Rutt, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Bronwyn M. O’Brien, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristina M. Atance, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author