More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children

Abstract

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children’s delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7‐ to 11‐year‐olds (N = 132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

“…Relatedly, we can ask more directly about the contribution of imagination to the development of new social knowledge in children, and the consequences of new ideas on the breadth of interpretations that children consider. Rather than exploiting children's imaginations for methodological purposes only—telling them fictional stories to find out what they know—we can encourage them to tell us stories, and ask how their imaginations change what they know (Burns, O'Connor, et al, 2021; Chernyak et al, 2017; Gaither et al, 2020). Another promising avenue of research is the link between action experience, causal knowledge, and social meaning‐making.…”

Episodic future thinking predicts differences in delay discounting: The mediating role of hippocampal structure

“…Two previous studies found that individual differences in EFT are associated with differences in discounting in adolescents ( Bromberg et al, 2015 ; McCue et al, 2019 ). Burns et al (2021) found a weak correlation between EFT ability and performance on delay discounting in children aged 7–11 years, but the correlation did not survive after controlling for age and IQ. These inconsistent findings may be because the EFT ability itself continues to develop from childhood to adolescence, and children require more effort to engage in EFT than adolescents.…”

“…To control for the possible effect of fluid intelligence on the relation between EFT and delay discounting ( Shamosh and Gray, 2008 ; Nusbaum and Silvia, 2011 ; Burns et al, 2021 ; Frith et al, 2021 ), we assessed the participants’ fluid intelligence using the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices for adults ( Raven and Court, 1998 ), which is a global nonverbal measure of abstract reasoning and has been proven to have good reliability and validity in Chinese sample ( Zhang, 1989 ). It consists of 60 items, in which participants were shown a matrix of pictures with missing parts and asked to select one of several possible answers that matches the visual features of the pictures.…”

The effects of cueing episodic future thinking on delay discounting in children, adolescents, and adults

“…Not only does the ability to choose to delay gratification improve over the preschool period (see Garon, 2016, for review), developmental improvements are also observed on delay discounting tasks across childhood and over the adolescent period (Green, Fry, & Myerson, 1994;Steinberg et al, 2009), although, as in adults, there are also substantial individual differences in child and adolescent populations (e.g., Burns, O'Connor, Atance, & McCormack, 2021;Khurana, Romer, Betancourt, & Hurt, 2018). Given children's welldocumented difficulties with delaying gratification, an intervention that promotes patient decision making in this population may have valuable applications.…”