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

这项拟议的研究调查了儿童和成人是如何对药剂的持久性进行推理的。对主体是什么以及它如何变化的推理是认知的基本组成部分，对日常生活有着深远的影响。一个人通常被认为从出生到死亡都是同一个人，尽管一生中会发生许多生理和心理上的变化。但发展心理学家发现，孩子们在认识到自己将如何随着时间的推移而变化方面存在有趣的困难。事实上，即使是成年人，对自己的变化和对他人变化的解释也是不同的。此外，越来越多的行为经济学研究表明，尽管成年人倾向于将近未来的自己（例如，明天存在的自己）视为与现在的自己本质上是同一个人，但他们经常将遥远未来的自己（例如，50年后的自己）视为另一个人。这种直觉对日常生活有着深远的影响：它们与我们对过去行为的自豪感和羞耻感、我们对未来的目标、我们如何看待与朋友和家人的关系——实际上，我们对自己是谁的感觉——有关。在这个提议中，我概述了四个系列的实验，这些实验研究了智能体随时间的持久性推理的发展。第一个系列研究了儿童和成人对生理和心理变化的预测。现有的研究发现，幼儿很难预测未来的变化，这些研究在此基础上验证了一种假设，即调查这是否源于对预测偏好变化的终身偏见，而其他未来的变化更容易理解和预测。第二个系列调查的是，儿童是否像成年人一样，更倾向于认为自己在过去发生了变化，而不是未来会发生变化。第三个系列研究了儿童和成人对“自我的时间尺度”的直觉——也就是说，过去和未来的一段时间被视为与当前的自我相同——以及这种时间尺度的感知如何在整个生命周期中发生变化。第四个系列探讨了这些发现（以及其他发现）如何影响儿童和成人如何对未来做出决定。这最后一个系列将使用现有的时间折扣（偏好较小的奖励，而不是较大的奖励）来研究这种决策的发展轨迹，以及它如何受到对代理持久性的不断变化的理解的影响。总之，这四个系列的实验将提供有关我们对持续存在的动因进行推理的能力的性质和发展的信息。这项研究也将联系到与儿童发挥自我控制能力和做出理性选择而不是冲动选择的能力有关的更实际的问题。

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.