Poster #34 - Preschoolers’ Reasoning about Changes in their Own Past Preferences

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Mental time travel (MTT)—or, our ability to mentally re-experience past events and pre-experience possible future events—plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making and develops rapidly during the preschool years. A particularly important aspect of MTT is our understanding that mental states that we held in the past may differ from those we currently hold, and those we will hold in the future. Our primary goal in the current study was to explore when children begin to understand that their own mental states change over time and, more specifically, that the preferences they held in the past differ from those they hold in the present.

We know from past research that children’s understanding of changes in their own future preferences develops between ages 3 and 5. For example, Bélanger et al. (2014) showed 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds child- and adult-preferable items (e.g., Kool-Aid and coffee) and asked them to select the items that they (1) liked best now and (2) would like best when they were “all grown up.” Whereas 5-year-olds were above chance in selecting the “adult” items on the future trials, 3-year-olds were below chance, whereas 4-year-olds were no different from chance.

Despite proposed similarities in reasoning about the past and the future (e.g., Harner, 1975; Hayne et al., 2011; Suddendorf & Busby, 2005), no study has examined children’s reasoning about changes in their own past preferences. We thus extended Bélanger et al.’s (2014) methodology by presenting 49 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds with five trials that included child- (e.g., Play-Doh) and baby- (e.g., rattle) preferable items. Children were then asked to select which items they (1) liked best now (self-now trials) and (2) used to like best “when they were a baby” (self-past trials). A perspective-taking score was then calculated by dividing the number of correct self-past items (e.g., “rattle”) by the number of correct self-now items (e.g., “Play-Doh”) yielding a proportion score for each child ranging from 0-1.

Analyses (one-way ANOVA) revealed that perspective-taking scores significantly improved with age, F(2, 46) = 8.96, p = .001, partial η2 = 0.28. Children’s perspective-taking scores were also compared to chance responding (i.e., mean perspective-taking score of 0.5) using the t distribution: 3-year-olds performed no different from chance (M=0.42, SD=0.37, t(20) = -0.94, p = .357), and 4- and 5-year-olds performed significantly above chance (M=0.72, SD=0.32, t(15) = 2.80, p = .014; M=0.88, SD=0.17, t(11) = 7.81, p < .001, respectively; see Figure 1). Thus, consistent with Bélanger et al.’s (2014) study on future preferences, 3-year-olds in our study had difficulty reasoning about changes in their own past preferences, whereas, 5-year-olds did not. However, unlike Bélanger et al.’s (2014) findings, our 3-year-olds were not significantly below chance and our 4-year-olds were above chance. Together, these findings suggest that it may be easier for children to reason about changes in their own past preferences compared to their future preferences. We discuss the possibility that this is due to stronger inhibitory demands when thinking about future, as compared to past, preferences.

Authors

• Leia Kopp, University of Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Lojain Hamwi, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alex Noble, University of Ottawa
  Non-Presenting Author

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