Cognitive factors that impact the development of episodic future thinking

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Adults think about the future constantly, with these thoughts ranging from the mundane (e.g., “What will have I have for lunch today”) to the more meaningful (e.g., “What will I do once I retire?”). This ability to mentally pre-experience the future has been termed “episodic future thinking,” and can be conceived as the future-oriented complement to episodic memory or, mentally re-experiencing the past. Although children’s capacity to think about the future is argued to be fundamental to such adaptive behaviours as planning and delaying gratification, it is only recently that researchers have begun to design methods to test its development. We now know that episodic future thinking develops substantially between ages 3 and 5, but we know very little about the factors that impact it. Identifying such factors is the first major goal of my research program. Accordingly, in a first set of studies, I will explore whether children can incorporate information about intervening events and temporal contingencies into their reasoning about the future. For example, an adult may hide her favorite cookies in the closet rather than in their customary location (e.g., cupboard) because she anticipates that someone else may find them and eat them before she gets to them next. Whether young children also take into account such potential intervening events when they reason about the future is one of the specific questions that my first set of studies will address. In a second set of studies I will examine whether the cognitive mechanisms involved in mentally projecting the self into the future differ from those involved in mentally projecting another person’s future. This issue is theoretically important since, by its very nature, episodic future thinking is defined as the pre-experiencing of one’s own future. As such, we would expect differences in the way that people – including young children - make such projections for self and other. The final goal of this research program is to examine whether children’s performance on the various tasks of episodic future thinking that will be used in this proposal is related to other higher-order cognitive processes, including theory of mind (or “mental state reasoning”) and executive function (a set of cognitive abilities that allow individuals to solve problems or accomplish goals) that also develop between ages 3 and 5. The research I propose will shed light on the factors that influence the accuracy of children’s future thinking, and will thus serve to inform parents and caregivers about contexts in which children may have particular difficulty reasoning about the future. It will also help to refine theories about the defining features of episodic future thinking and will have practical relevance for optimizing future thinking across the lifespan and mitigating the tendency for people to engage in behaviour with negative future consequences (e.g., failing to save for retirement).