My future self: Young children's ability to anticipate and explain future states

Two experiments examine preschool-aged children's ability to anticipate physiological states of the self. One hundred and eight 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were presented with stories and pictorial scenes designed to evoke thought about future states such as thirst, cold, and hunger. They were asked to imagine themselves in these scenarios and to choose one item from a set of three that they would need. Only one of the items could be used to address the future state. In both experiments, developmental differences were obtained for correct item choices and types of verbal explanations. In Experiment 2, the performance of the 3- and 4-year-olds was negatively affected by introducing items that were semantically associated with the scenarios but did not address the future state, whereas the 5-year-olds’ performance was not. Results are discussed with respect to children's understanding of the future, theory of mind, and inhibitory control skills.     

Young children's emerging ability to make false statements

This study examined the origins of children's ability to make consciously false statements, a necessary component of lying. Children 2 to 5 years of age were rewarded for claiming that they saw a picture of a bird when viewing pictures of fish. They were asked outcome questions ("Do you win/lose?"), recognition questions ("Do you have a bird/fish?"), and recall questions ("What do you have?"), which were hypothesized to vary in difficulty depending on the need for consciousness of falsity (less for outcome questions) and self-generation of an appropriate response (more for recall questions). The youngest children (2? to 3? years old) were above chance on outcome questions, but it was not until age 3? that children performed above chance on recognition questions or were capable of maintaining false claims across question types. Findings have implications for understanding the emergence of deception in young children.     

Young children's ability to recognize advertisements in web page designs

Identifying what is, and what is not an advertisement is the first step in realizing that an advertisement is a marketing message. Children can distinguish television advertisements from programmes by about 5 years of age. Although previous researchers have investigated television advertising, little attention has been given to advertisements in other media, even though other media, especially the Internet, have become important channels of marketing to children. We showed children printed copies of invented web pages that included advertisements, half of which had price information, and asked the children to point to whatever they thought was an advertisement. In two experiments we tested a total of 401 children, aged 6, 8, 10 and 12 years of age, from the United Kingdom and Indonesia. Six‐year‐olds recognized a quarter of the advertisements, 8‐year‐olds recognized half the advertisements, and the 10‐ and 12‐year‐olds recognized about three‐quarters. Only the 10‐ and 12‐year‐olds were more likely to identify an advertisement when it included a price. We contrast our findings with previous results about the identification of television advertising, and discuss why children were poorer at recognizing web page advertisements. The performance of the children has implications for theories about how children develop an understanding of advertising.     

Young children's ability to solve spatial problems involving a choice

When do young children become able to make an adequate choice between two alternatives based on spatial information? Children of 20, 30, and 40 months of age were either presented with two objects with different cross-sections and one aperture, or one object and two different apertures. In each trial there was one object – aperture match and the task was to find that match and insert the object. All the children understood the task and tried to solve the problems but the 20-month-olds performed randomly and not even the 40-month-olds chose all the correct correspondences consistently. The results also showed that it is easier to choose between apertures than objects. This contrasts with the ability to solve the insertion problem once the choice was made. When choosing the correct object or aperture, the 40-month-olds inserted the triangle successfully in 85% of the cases. The boys and girls were equally good at solving the task, but the boys did it faster. The results show that making a choice adds significantly to the difficulty of solving spatial problems. It requires systematic examination of the objects and apertures involved, a working memory that can handle at least three items at a time, and an ability to inhibit an incorrect choice. Such executive functions are typically found in older preschool children but the present task shows that with an appropriate setup their development can be traced from a much earlier age.     

Young children's reasoning about the order of past events

Four studies are reported that employed an object location task to assess temporal-causal reasoning. In Experiments 1-3, successfully locating the object required a retrospective consideration of the order in which two events had occurred. In Experiment 1, 5- but not 4-year-olds were successful; 4-year-olds also failed to perform at above-chance levels in modified versions of the task in Experiments 2 and 3. However, in Experiment 4, 3-year-olds were successful when they were able to see the object being placed first in one location and then in the other, rather than having to consider retrospectively the sequence in which two events had happened. The results suggest that reasoning about the causal significance of the temporal order of events may not be fully developed before 5 years.     

Developmental changes in children's understanding of future likelihood and uncertainty

Two measures assessed 4-10-year-olds’ and adults’ (N = 201) understanding of future likelihood and uncertainty. In one task, participants sequenced sets of event pictures varying by one physical dimension according to increasing future likelihood. In a separate task, participants rated characters’ thoughts about the likelihood of future events, their emotions, and their decisions in indeterminate social situations. Results showed significant development between ages 4 and 10 in seriating events according to future likelihood and in selecting thought and emotion ratings indicative of future uncertainty. Higher performance on the future likelihood ordering task correlated with greater understanding of future uncertainty in thought, emotion, and decision judgments. Females judged future events to be more uncertain than males.     

Young children's storybooks as a source of mental state information

Ninety children's books (half for 3–4-year-olds and half for 5–6-year-olds) were analyzed for references to mental state in three ways: (a) via words and expressions in the text, (b) via the pictures, and (c) via ironic situations. Books for older children were significantly longer than the books for younger children, and overall, they included both a higher frequency of mental state references and a wider variety of such references. However, the rate of textual references to mental state was high for both groups, with a mental state token occurring on average every three sentences in books for both age groups. Moreover, the rate at which new types of mental state references appeared was also high; about every second token represented a new type of mental state reference. Pictures typically failed to represent independently the mental state concepts expressed in the text, but pictures and text together conveyed situational irony in over one-third of the books. Thus, mental state information was largely conveyed via words and irony. These findings suggest that storybook reading may provide even young children with a rich context for developing an understanding of mind.     

Developmental changes in preschoolers' ability to distinguish memories of performed,pretended, and imagined actions

The goals of the research presented in this article were to: a) examine changes in pre-schoolers' ability to distinguish among memories of performed, pretended, and imagined episodes, and b) use source monitoring as a tool for inferring the nature of preschoolers' conceptualizations of pretense. The participants, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, performed, pretended, and imagined performing actions. After a short delay, they identified the origin of their memories in a 3-alternative, forced-choice procedure. Results showed significant improvements between ages 3 and 4 in the ability to distinguish: a) performed actions from imagined actions, and b) performed actions from pretended actions. However, 4- and 5- year-olds confused memories of pretended and imagined actions. These results were replicated in a second experiment with 3- and 4-year-olds, using a simpler 2-alternative, forced-choice format. The findings suggest that, by age 4, children represent both pretense and imagination in memory according to cognitive operation features associated with generating a fictional mental state. Thus, 4-year-olds may recognize that constructing a mental, alternative reality is an important part of pretense.     

Coparenting as a mediator between physical custody arrangements and children's mental health

The detrimental effects of parental break-up on children's mental health are well-documented. However, research has also shown that children living in joint physical custody (JPC) arrangements often fare better than children living in sole physical custody (SPC) arrangements. Thus, the question arises: What are the differences between JPC and SPC that account for those results? Drawing on data from the Family Models in Germany (FAMOD) study conducted in 2019, structural equation models (SEM) were estimated to deduct the mediating role of coparenting support in children's mental health in 465 JPC and 652 SPC families with children aged 2–14. The findings suggest that the better mental health observed among children in JPC families than among children in SPC families was fully mediated by coparenting support. However, this held true only for internalizing and externalizing behavior, but not for prosocial behavior as no differences between JPC and SPC were found for this dimension. The findings affirm the importance of supportive coparenting for children's well-being after family dissolution in both SPC and JPC arrangements. After breaking up, parents should be supported in their parental engagement through coparenting counseling or psychoeducation classes.     

Adults' ability to detect children's lying

Adults are poor deception detectors when examining lies told by adults, on average. However, there are some adults who are better at detecting lies than others. Children learn to lie at a very young age, a behavior that is socialized by parents. Yet, less is known about the ability to detect children's lies, particularly with regard to individual differences in the ability to detect this deception. The current study explored adult raters' ability to discern honesty in children who lied or told the truth about committing a misdeed. Results showed that adults are no better at detecting children's lies than they are with adult lies. In particular, adults were very poor at identifying children's honest statements. However, individual differences did emerge, suggesting that the ability to detect lying in children might be facilitated by relevant experience working with children. Implications for legal and mental health contexts are discussed.     

Young children's interpersonal trust consistency as a predictor of future school adjustment

Young children's interpersonal trust consistency was examined as a predictor of future school adjustment. One hundred and ninety two (95 male and 97 female, M_age = 6 years 2 months, SD_age = 6 months) children from school years 1 and 2 in the United Kingdom were tested twice over one year. Children completed measures of peer trust and school adjustment and teachers completed the Short-Form Teacher Rating Scale of School Adjustment. Longitudinal quadratic relationships emerged between consistency of children's peer trust beliefs and peer-reported trustworthiness and school adjustment and these varied according to social group, facet of trust, and indicator of school adjustment. The findings support the conclusion that interpersonal trust consistency, especially for secret-keeping, predicts aspects of young children's school adjustment.     

Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together

Synthese - Bringing research on collective memory together with research on episodic future thought, Szpunar and Szpunar (Mem Stud 9(4):376–389, 2016) have recently developed the concept of...     

The reality of the past versus the ideality of the future: emotional valence and functional differences between past and future mental time travel

Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backward or forward in time in order to remember an event from one’s personal past or to imagine a possible event in one’s personal future. Past and future MTT share many similarities, and there is evidence to suggest that the two temporal directions rely on a shared neural network and similar cognitive structures. At the same time, one major difference between past and future MTT is that future as compared to past events generally are more emotionally positive and idyllic, suggesting that the two types of event representations may also serve different functions for emotion, self, and behavioral regulation. Here, we asked 158 participants to remember one positive and one negative event from their personal past as well as to imagine one positive and one negative event from their potential personal future and to rate the events on phenomenological characteristics. We replicated previous work regarding similarities between past and future MTT. We also found that positive events were more phenomenologically vivid than negative events. However, across most variables, we consistently found an increased effect of emotional valence for future as compared to past MTT, showing that the differences between positive and negative events were larger for future than for past events. Our findings support the idea that future MTT is biased by uncorrected positive illusions, whereas past MTT is constrained by the reality of things that have actually happened.     

Preschool children's ability to visually represent relations

The developmental origins of mapping temporal relations onto space was investigated in N = 122 3- to 5-year-old children and adults. Spontaneous production and comprehension were investigated. Production was investigated in two conditions: an iconic condition (three-dimensional objects depicting the events or objects to be represented) and an abstract condition (plain discs). Consistent with findings by Tversky, Kugelmass and Winter (1991), 5-year-olds performed on an adult-like level. Developmental progress was observed between the ages of 3 and 4 years, with comprehension preceding production. Consistent with DeLoache's findings (2000), 4-year-olds' performance was better in abstract than in iconic conditions, indicating that dual representational demands may have affected task performance in the iconic condition. In sum, abilities to map temporal relations onto spatial relations appear to develop spontaneously, even before children have experience with conventional notational systems.