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

拟议中的研究调查了儿童和成人如何随着时间的推移对代理人的持久性进行推理。关于智能体是什么以及它如何改变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。一个人从出生到死亡通常被认为是同一个人，尽管一生中发生了许多生理和心理变化。但发展心理学家发现，孩子们在欣赏他们将如何随着时间的推移而改变方面有着有趣的困难。事实上，即使是成年人，对自身变化的推理也与对他人变化的推理不同。此外，越来越多的行为经济学研究表明，虽然成年人倾向于看到他们不久的将来的自己（例如，明天存在的自我）与他们当前的自我基本上是同一个人，他们经常对待他们遥远未来的自我（例如，50年后的今天，就好像他们是另一个人。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-事实上，我们对自己的感觉-联系在一起。 在这个建议中，我概述了四个系列的实验，研究随着时间的推移，代理的持久性推理的发展。第一个系列研究了儿童和成人对身体和心理变化的预测。基于现有的研究发现，幼儿很难预测未来的变化，这些研究测试了一个假设，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。第二个系列调查了孩子们是否像成年人一样，更有可能认为他们过去已经改变了，而不是他们将来会改变。第三个系列考察了儿童和成人对“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对未来的决策。这最后一个系列将使用现有的时间折扣措施（对较小奖励的偏好早于较大奖励的偏好）来研究这种决策的发展轨迹，以及随着时间的推移，对代理人持久性的理解的变化如何影响它。总之，这四个系列的实验将提供信息的性质和发展，我们的能力，推理代理持续随着时间的推移。这项研究还将与儿童自我控制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联系起来。

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.