Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Humans think about the future often; we imagine daily events such as the meal we will cook tonight, but also longer-term and more significant events, for example, what we plan to do once we retire. This capacity for episodic future thinking has important implications for decision-making, planning, and self-control in both children and adults. The current research explores young children's ability to independently, or "spontaneously", engage their episodic future thinking to generate adaptive future-directed intentions and actions (e.g., obtaining an item that will be useful later). In a first set of experiments, we will test the extent to which 4- to 7-year-old children can, without any instructions from an adult Experimenter, or cues from their environment, obtain an item that will be useful to address a situation that they will later encounter. In a next experiment, we will ask parents to track their child's future-oriented talk and behaviour in their home environment, so that we can gain a richer understanding of the breadth and flexibility of children's future thinking as it plays out in their day-to-day lives. Using questionnaires, parents of 4- to 7-year-olds will provide detailed descriptions of their child's future-oriented statements and actions. This methodology will allow us to assess whether more spontaneous forms of future thought increase with age, as well as the kinds of future-oriented needs and situations children are most apt to discuss/prepare for. Our final objective is to examine the development of children's "prospective self-control," defined as engaging in strategies to boost one's self-control when future temptation is anticipated - for example, asking your partner to hide the cookies so you will not be tempted to eat them later. This ability is particularly relevant to the current research because it relies on the capacity to mentally project into the future and, critically, spontaneously take action to avoid future temptation. In several experiments we will test 4- to 7-year-olds' understanding that certain contexts (e.g., saving, delaying gratification) pose self-control challenges and, using structured observations, we will determine whether children spontaneously implement advance strategies to address them. The current research involves the creation of novel methodological approaches leading to new knowledge that will allow the scientific community and the public (e.g., parents) to better understand the development of adaptive, future-oriented thinking. This capacity is important to study not least because failures to think ahead (e.g., not saving adequately for retirement) have important consequences to the individual and to society. The better we understand future-oriented thinking and its development, the better we are positioned to developing methods, grounded in the cognitive sciences, to improve its accuracy and adaptiveness.