Children's and adult's understanding of the persistence of agents over time

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The proposed research investigates how children and adults reason about the persistence of agents over time. Reasoning about what an agent is and how it can change is a basic building block of cognition and has profound implications for everyday life. A person is usually thought of as being the same individual from birth to death, despite the many physical and psychological changes that occur throughout a lifetime. But developmental psychologists find that children have intriguing difficulties in appreciating how they will change over time. Indeed, even adults reason differently about changes in themselves than about the changes in other people. Further, a growing body of research in behavioural economics suggests that while adults tend to see their near-future selves (e.g., the self that exists tomorrow) to be fundamentally the same person as their current self, they often treat their distant-future selves (e.g., 50 years from now) as if they were someone else. Such intuitions have profound implications for everyday life: they connect to our feelings of pride and shame for actions we've done in the past, our goals for the future, how we see our relationships with friends and family-indeed, our very sense of who we are. In this proposal, I outline four series of experiments that investigate the development of reasoning about the persistence of agents over time. The first series examines children's and adults' predictions of physical and psychological change across time. Building on existing research that finds that young children have difficulty predicting future change, these studies test the hypothesis that investigate whether this stems from a lifelong bias against predicting change in preferences, while other future changes are more easily understood and predicted. The second series investigates whether children, like adults, are more likely to think that they've changed in the past than that they will change in the future. The third series examines children's and adults' intuitions about the "temporal size of the self"-that is, the period of time into the past and future that is seen as identical with the current self-and how the perception of this temporal size changes across the lifespan. The fourth series explores how these findings (and others) affect how children and adults make decisions about the future. This final series will use existing measures of temporal discounting (a preference for smaller rewards sooner over larger rewards later) to investigate the developmental trajectory of such decision-making, and how it is affected by a shifting understanding of the persistence of agents over time. Together, these four series of experiments will be informative about the nature and development of our capacity to reason about agents persisting over time. This research will connect as well to more practical issues relating to children's capacity to exert self-control and to make rational choices, rather than impulsive ones.