The effect of psychological distance on young children's future predictions

Abstract

The current study examined the impact of psychological distance on children's performance on the pretzel task. In this task, children eat pretzels (inducing thirst) and then are asked to reason about future preferences (pretzels or water). Children typically perform poorly on this task, indicating a future preference for water over pretzels, potentially due to conflicting current and future states. Given past work showing that children's future reasoning is more accurate for another person, we asked 90 thirsty 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds to reason about their own and an experimenter's future preference. Results showed that thirsty children had more difficulty predicting their own future preference compared with the experimenter's. Thirstier children were more likely to predict a future preference for water. Thirst interacted with age when making a future choice for the experimenter. How psychological distance might boost episodic foresight and possible reasons for children's poor pretzel task performance are discussed. Highlights Does psychological distancing improve children's ability to make accurate future predictions when current and future states conflict? Using the Pretzel task, thirsty children were less accurate when predicting their own future preferences compared with the future preferences of another person. Psychological distancing may help children overcome their current state to reason more accurately about the future.

The effect of episodic future simulation and motivation on young children’s induced-state episodic foresight

“…We predicted that: (1) there will be no age-related improvements in Pretzel task performance in line with past research ( Atance & Meltzoff, 2005 ; Cheke & Clayton, 2019 ; Kramer et al, 2017 ; Mahy et al, 2014 ; Mahy, 2016 ; Mazachowsky, Koktavy, & Mahy, 2019 ), (2) children will perform better on the Pretzel task in the episodic simulation and motivation conditions (selecting water less often as their future preference) compared to the standard thirsty condition, and (3) children will take longer to make their future preference choice in the episodic simulation condition compared to all other conditions (potentially due to engagement in future simulation processes). We also examined children’s explanations for their future choices in an exploratory manner by coding whether children’s explanations focused on their present state, future state, their general preferences, or ‘other’ (if it did not fit into any of the first three categories, including no response).…”

“…Future research could also explore other manipulations that might also improve children’s EpF in tasks where there is current-future state conflict. For example, Mazachowsky et al (2019) found that having children make decisions for an adult experimenter improved performance on Pretzel task performance (although children were at chance levels) compared to when they made a decision for themselves. Other manipulations, such as having children consider their own past experiences with hunger and thirst, might improve Pretzel task performance (in line with the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; Schacter & Addis, 2007 ) and help to overcome presentism bias.…”

The roles of perspective and language in children’s ability to delay gratification

“…Another variable that may be important in explaining younger children's differential responding for self and other is that when children think about their own future, their mental projections are heavily influenced by their current state (e.g., Atance & Meltzoff, 2006;Kramer, Goldfarb, Tashjian, & Lagattuta, 2017;Mahy, 2016;Mazachowsky, Koktavy, & Mahy, 2019). In contrast, this influence is tempered when thinking about another person's future, thus leading to more optimal future-oriented choices (and an other-over-self advantage).…”

“…Importantly, only Prencipe and Zelazo's (2005) study has directly examined the role of making DoG decisions for the self and another person (hence manipulating psychological distance by asking children to take different perspectives). Beyond the domain of DoG, increasing psychological distance by taking the perspective of another person has been shown to increase performance on tasks measuring cognitive control (White & Carlson, 2016), episodic future thinking (Lee & Atance, 2016;Mazachowsky, Koktavy, & Mahy, 2019;Russell, Alexis, & Clayton, 2010), and perseverance (White et al, 2017). Thus, it seems that encouraging children to take the perspective of another person is an effective way to improve children's performance in a number of domains of development.…”

Inhibition and cognitive flexibility are related to prediction of one’s own future preferences in young British and Chinese children

“…Similarly in a different experiment, children aged between 3 and 7 years had difficulty overcoming their salient state of thirst, which impaired their future predictions but had more success when predicting for another individual, i.e. the experimenter (Mazachowsky, Koktavy, & Mahy, 2019).…”