3-150 - The importance of envisioning the future: Development and adaptive function

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The ability to envision a personal future event in rich contextual detail (i.e., episodic prospection) is thought to serve a unique adaptive function: it may compel an individual to self-regulate in order to achieve a desirable future outcome or to avoid an undesirable future outcome. However, research directly testing this hypothesis has been largely missing, despite its potential relevance to healthy and adaptive function across development. This international symposium addresses this gap in the literature. Altogether, ten studies in 4 papers examine the development and adaptive function of episodic prospection during late childhood and adolescence, periods during which the development of episodic prospection has just begun to be outlined, and during which there is more opportunity for independent action making it imperative to determine the potential benefits of this ability.

Paper 1 examines the development of episodic prospection and its influence (compared to semantic future thinking and counterfactual reasoning) on math performance. Paper 2 also examines the influence of future thinking on academic performance, investigating whether viewing the adult future self as psychologically relevant may mediate the influence of future thinking on school performance during childhood and adolescence. Papers 3 and 4 examine the influence of episodic prospection on delayed discounting and medicine adherence during adolescence, while also examining the relation between episodic prospection and other aspects of temporal cognition. The discussion will focus on integrating findings across these papers, which together provide exciting insight into the development and adaptive function of episodic prospection.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Christine Coughlin, UC Davis

• Simona Ghetti, University of California-Davis

Individual Presentations

• Episodic prospection and math achievement: Testing a functional hypothesis - Presenting Author: Christine Coughlin, UC Davis; Janani Prabhakar, University of California, Davis; Simona Ghetti, University of California-Davis

• Connecting present and future self matters - Presenting Author: Daphna Oyserman, University of Southern California; Cecile Nurra, University of Grenoble, France

• Linking episodic future thinking to temporal discounting in adolescents - Presenting Author: Uli Bromberg, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; Antonius Wiehler, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; Maria Lobatcheva, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; Jan Peters, Universität zu Köln, Germany

• Temporal orientation and episodic future thinking in adolescents - Presenting Author: Teresa McCormack, Queen's University Belfast; Robyn McCue, Queen’s University Belfast; Aidan Feeney, Queen's University Belfast; James McElnay, Queen’s University Belfast