Cognitive factors that impact the development of episodic future thinking

成年人经常思考未来，这些想法从世俗的（例如，“我今天午餐吃什么”）到更有意义的（例如，“我退休后要做什么？”）。这种在心理上预先体验未来的能力被称为“情景未来思维”，可以被认为是对情景记忆的未来导向的补充，或者是在心理上重新体验过去。尽管儿童思考未来的能力被认为是诸如计划和延迟满足等适应性行为的基础，但直到最近，研究人员才开始设计测试其发展的方法。我们现在知道，情景未来思维在3岁到5岁之间得到了很大的发展，但我们对影响它的因素知之甚少。确定这些因素是我的研究计划的第一个主要目标。因此，在第一组研究中，我将探讨儿童是否能够将有关干预事件和时间偶然性的信息纳入他们对未来的推理中。例如，一个成年人可能会把她最喜欢的饼干藏在壁橱里，而不是通常的地方（例如，橱柜），因为她预料到别人可能会发现它们，并在她下一个拿到它们之前吃掉它们。幼儿在推理未来时是否也会考虑到这些潜在的干预事件，这是我的第一组研究要解决的具体问题之一。在第二组研究中，我将检验在心理上将自我投射到未来的认知机制与在心理上将他人的未来投射的认知机制是否不同。这个问题在理论上很重要，因为就其本质而言，情景未来思维被定义为对自己未来的预先体验。因此，我们期望人们——包括小孩子——对自己和他人做出这样的预测的方式会有所不同。这个研究项目的最终目标是检验儿童在情景未来思考的各种任务中的表现是否与其他高阶认知过程有关，包括心理理论（或“精神状态推理”）和执行功能（一套允许个人解决问题或完成目标的认知能力），这些过程也在3到5岁之间发展。我提出的这项研究将揭示影响儿童对未来思考准确性的因素，从而使父母和照顾者了解儿童在哪些情况下对未来的推理可能特别困难。它还将有助于完善关于情景未来思维的定义特征的理论，并将在整个生命周期中优化未来思维，并减轻人们从事具有负面未来后果的行为的倾向（例如，未能为退休储蓄）。

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).