The development and coherence of future-oriented behaviors during the preschool years

Abstract

Although previous research has identified a number of interesting aspects of future thinking in adults, little is known about the developmental trajectory and coherence of future-oriented behaviors during early childhood. The primary goal of this study was to explore these issues by administering a battery of tasks assessing different aspects of future thinking, including mental time travel, delay of gratification, planning, and prospective memory, to 72 preschoolers. Results revealed that performance on all of the tasks increased significantly between 3 and 5 years of age. Although most tasks were correlated, suggesting “behavioral” coherence, many of these significant correlations dropped out once age and receptive vocabulary were controlled. These results are discussed with respect to theories about, and measurement of, future orientation.

Introduction

Most adults spend a great deal of time thinking about their futures. Indeed, humans are often engaged in behaviors such as planning and delay of gratification, argued by some to be distinctive to our species (e.g., Calvin, 2004). As such, it is not surprising that many areas of psychology, including social psychology (e.g., Buehler and McFarland, 2001, Gilbert, 2006, Loewenstein and Schkade, 1999, Newby-Clark and Ross, 2003), neuropsychology (e.g., Addis et al., 2007, Okuda et al., 2003), developmental psychology (e.g., Atance and Meltzoff, 2005, Atance and Meltzoff, 2006, Busby and Suddendorf, 2005, Haith et al., 1994, Hudson, 2006), and comparative psychology (e.g., Clayton et al., 2003, Mulcahy and Call, 2006, Naqshbandi and Roberts, 2006, Suddendorf and Busby, 2005), have become increasingly interested in exploring future thinking ability. In this article, we examine future thinking from a developmental perspective. We first consider the possible behavioral manifestations of future thinking ability and then empirically examine their development and the relations between them during the preschool years.

Young children’s transition from being predominantly rooted in the “here and now” to anticipating, planning for, and contemplating the future is of critical importance to healthy development and adaptation. There are many different aspects of young children’s daily lives that call on the capacity to think about and plan for the future. For example, children must learn that engaging in an undesirable behavior now (e.g., putting away one’s toys) may be the only means of bringing about a desirable future outcome (e.g., receiving a treat, watching television). In addition, children’s growing awareness of their own future states helps them to plan for a range of different events. If a child who is told that she will be spending the night at her grandmother’s house can anticipate the emotions associated with being separated from her parents, then she can better plan to address these (e.g., by bringing a favorite blanket or teddy bear). These and other future-oriented behaviors are theoretically important because they mark a transition from children reacting to events as they occur to children adaptively tailoring their behavior in anticipation of what lies ahead.

Despite the importance and adaptivity of future thinking, not much is known about its development or how it is reflected behaviorally. Part of the reason for this gap in our knowledge is that there is no agreed-on definition, or taxonomy, of future thinking (cf. Haith, 1997); hence, there are very few tasks whose aim is to measure this specific construct in young children. This gap has, however, begun to narrow due to recent research and theorizing on humans’ capacity for “mental time travel” (MTT) (e.g., Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997, Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007, Tulving, 2005). With respect to the future, MTT is defined as the ability to project the self forward in time to anticipate and plan for future events, states, and needs (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). As such, it comprises an important aspect of future orientation. Several paradigms have now been devised to assess the development of MTT ability.

Atance and Meltzoff (2005) developed a paradigm to assess preschoolers’ capacity to anticipate future states of the self. They asked children to pretend that they would engage in a variety of relatively novel events (e.g., walking up a mountain, walking across a rocky stream) and then asked them to choose an item from a set of three items that they should bring with them to the event in question. For example, when asked to imagine walking across a rocky stream, children were presented with Band-Aids, a pillow, and a fish. The Band-Aids were considered to be the correct choice because they could be used to address the future state of getting hurt. In one experiment, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were tested on their ability to choose items that could be used to address various future states of the self (and hence MTT). Results indicated that these age groups chose the correct items 61, 75, and 92% of the time, respectively. When asked to explain the reasons for their choices, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds provided future-oriented justifications (e.g., “I might get hurt”) in 44, 40, and 59% of the trials, respectively.

Busby and Suddendorf (2005) assessed MTT capacity by asking 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds to anticipate something that they would do tomorrow as well as something that they would not do tomorrow. For children’s responses to be scored as correct on both of these questions, children needed to provide a coherent response that a parent subsequently judged to be correct. Across two experiments, 3-year-olds provided correct responses to these two types of questions 11 to 31% of the time, whereas 4-year-olds responded correctly 60 to 69% of the time—a difference that was significant. Five-year-olds were also tested in a second experiment, and their percentages of correct responses ranged between 63 and 87%. There were no significant differences between children’s answers to the “negative” questions about the future and their answers to the “positive” ones. These two studies suggest that MTT is emerging and showing marked development during the preschool years.

To date, however, there has been no attempt to explore how these instantiations of MTT may be related to other aspects of children’s behavior that have also been described as future oriented, including the capacity to delay gratification, plan, and engage in acts of prospective memory. In the following subsections, we outline the types of tasks used to assess these abilities along with their reported developmental trajectories.

Delay of gratification is also described as “future-oriented self-control” (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). In the classic delay of gratification paradigm (e.g., Mischel et al., 1989), children are presented with a choice between a highly desirable reward (e.g., 10 mini-marshmallows) and a less desirable one (e.g., 2 mini-marshmallows). Children are told that they can either have the less desirable reward immediately or wait to obtain the larger reward. This wait period typically lasts between 5 and 15 min, during which children are left alone seated in a room with the rewards visible to them. Although there is substantial individual variability, the ability to delay gratification in this context and others like it increases with age (e.g., Mischel et al., 1989, Moore et al., 1998, Thompson et al., 1997).

There are many different definitions of planning, but there is consensus that planning involves the representation of, and preparation for, a future goal. Thus, by definition, planning is a future-oriented behavior. Various tasks have been used to examine young children’s planning skills. A common one is an adapted version of Tower of Hanoi (e.g., Carlson et al., 2004, Klahr and Robinson, 1981). In this task, children must plan how they will move a series of disks from peg to peg to create a structure that matches the experimenter’s structure. A challenging feature of this task is that children are required to follow a set of predetermined rules that often results in them needing to execute (correct) moves that appear to distance them from the final goal/structure.

Other tasks to tap the development of planning abilities include “search” tasks, which require children to plan how best to minimize the distance traveled from one point to the next to obtain a series of objects (e.g., Fabricius, 1988, Wellman et al., 1985), and “route planning” tasks, which require children to navigate as efficiently as possible through a model grocery store to obtain specified items (e.g., Gauvain & Rogoff, 1989) or plan a route from start to finish through a maze (e.g., Gardner & Rogoff, 1990). Children’s planning skills have also been assessed in more “real world” settings. For instance, Hudson, Shapiro, and Sosa (1995) asked children to plan for the familiar events of going to the beach and going grocery shopping. Results from these studies indicate that children’s performance on various planning tasks generally improves with age, with a noticeable increase between 3 and 5 years of age (e.g., Carlson et al., 2004, Hudson et al., 1995).

Prospective memory is defined as remembering to perform an action at some time in the future (Kerns, 2000); thus, unlike retrospective memory, it is future oriented. Researchers have distinguished between event-based and time-based prospective memory tasks (Einstein and McDaniel, 1990, Kerns, 2000). Event-based tasks require individuals to perform an action that is contingent on the occurrence of an external event or stimulus (e.g., remembering to give John an invitation on seeing him). In contrast, time-based tasks require individuals to remember to perform an action at a certain point in time or within a certain time period. Because time-based prospective memory does not reportedly develop until middle childhood (Kliegel, Ropeter, & Mackinlay, 2006), we restrict our description to those tasks used to assess event-based prospective memory.

Kvavilashvili, Messer, and Ebdon (2001) asked 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds to name pictures in a stack of cards. The prospective memory aspect of this task was that children were told that when they encountered a picture of an animal, they should put it into a nearby basket. The 7-year-olds were significantly more likely to remember to perform this action than were the younger children. Guajardo and Best (2000) developed a more naturalistic type of prospective memory task. Their task simply entailed asking groups of 3- and 5-year-olds to remember to ask for a sticker and to close the door on completion of a computer task in which they were about to engage. Children were also given a longer delay task that required them to remember to return a picture and to ask for a pencil during a second laboratory visit that occurred between 24 and 72 h later. Results indicated that the 3-year-olds were beginning to demonstrate prospective memory skills on these naturalistic tasks but that by 5 years of age success rates were significantly higher. For instance, whereas only 25 and 52% of the 3-year-olds remembered to close the door and ask for the sticker, respectively, the corresponding percentages were 75 and 83% for the 5-year-olds.

Each of the behaviors described to this point seems to develop substantially between 3 and 5 years of age and is also argued to rely on frontal lobe functioning (e.g., Goel and Grafman, 1995, Kliegel et al., 2006). Each also requires children to move beyond the here and now and to adopt a future orientation. Thus, it is possible that these behaviors are related by virtue of this requirement. For example, the children who can begin to envision what will happen tomorrow may be the same children who can begin to correctly plot their future moves on planning tasks such as Tower of Hanoi. Alternatively, these behaviors may be relatively distinct. It is possible that future thinking ability is necessary but not sufficient for their development. For example, whereas talking about, or planning, what to do tomorrow may require little, if any, capacity for inhibitory control, delaying gratification may require substantially more. Moreover, different subtypes of future thinking ability may exist, and these might not be fully overlapping. For example, in Tower of Hanoi, children must engage in some form of future thinking, but it may differ substantially from the form that is required when thinking explicitly about what one will be doing tomorrow.

The goal of this investigation was to examine the development and coherence of future-oriented behaviors. Children between 3 and 5 years of age were given a battery of tasks that measure important aspects of future orientation, including MTT ability, delay of gratification, planning, and prospective memory. We also included the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–3rd edition (PPVT-3) (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) to measure children’s receptive vocabulary. Doing so allowed us to determine whether any significant intertask correlations remained when children’s vocabulary scores (and age) were controlled. Such a finding would suggest that the behaviors under study draw on a common conceptual core that is independent of verbal ability and age.

We hypothesized that children’s performance on the various tasks would increase with age and that tasks designed to measure the same particular capacity (i.e., MTT, planning, and prospective memory) would be significantly correlated. Our predictions about correlations between the various tasks were less certain, but we hypothesized that, due to their fundamental requirement of adopting a future orientation, they should be at least moderately correlated even when controlling for age and verbal ability.