4.5 Article

The Effect of Episodic Future Thinking on Young Children's Future-Oriented Decision Making

Journal

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 57, Issue 6, Pages 976-990

Publisher

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/dev0001179

Keywords

delay of gratification; episodic future thinking; mental time travel; temporal discounting

Funding

  1. Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, United Kingdom [ES/N01281X/1]
  2. ESRC [ES/N01281X/1] Funding Source: UKRI

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The study found that developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with preschoolers' performance on a delay choice task, but deliberately engaging in thinking about future events may impair their ability to make future-oriented decisions.
We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was significantly associated with performance on the delay choice task, but this was not the case for other EFT measures. Study 2 compared the performance of 4-to 5-year-olds (N = 130) on the delay choice task when cued to think about either a future, past, or habitual event versus a no-cue baseline. Overall, cuing impaired performance on the delay choice task. Although EFT does show a relation to performance in a delay choice task in preschoolers, deliberately engaging in thought about future events may be too taxing in young children to reliably enhance the ability to make future-oriented decisions.

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