We explored children’s and adults’ ability to disengage from current physiological states when forecasting future desires. In Study 1, 8- to 13-year-olds and adults (N=104) ate pretzels (to induce thirst) and then predicted and explained what they would want tomorrow, pretzels or water. Demonstrating lifespan continuity, approximately 70% of participants, regardless of age, chose water and referenced current thirst as their rationale. Individual differences in working memory and undergraduate GPA were positively related to performance on the pretzel task. In Study 2, we obtained baseline preferences from adults (N=35) and confirmed that, prior to consuming pretzels, people do not anticipate wanting water more than pretzels the next day. Together, these findings indicate that both children and adults are tethered to the present when forecasting their future desires.

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 205) responded to vignettes involving three individuals with different expectations (high, low, and no) for a future event. Participants judged characters' pre-outcome emotions, as well as predicted and explained their feelings following three events (positive, attenuated, and negative). Although adults rated high-expectation characters more negatively than low-expectation characters after all outcomes, children shared this intuition starting at 6-7 years for negative outcomes, 8-10 years for attenuated, and never for positive. Comparison to baseline (no expectation) indicated that understanding the costs of high expectations emerges first and remains more robust across age than recognition that low expectations carry benefits. Explanation analyses further clarified this developing awareness about the relation between thoughts and emotions over time.

This study compared the relative difficulty of the happy-sad inhibitory control task (say "happy" for the sad face and "sad" for the happy face) against other card tasks that varied by the presence and type (focal vs. peripheral; negative vs. positive) of emotional information in a sample of 4- to 11-year-olds and adults (N = 264). Participants also completed parallel "name games" (direct labeling). All age groups made more errors and took longer to respond to happy-sad compared to other versions, and the relative difficulty of happy-sad increased with age. The happy-sad name game even posed a greater challenge than some opposite games. These data provide insight into the impact of emotions on cognitive processing across a wide age range.

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The current study examined 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ (N = 280) tendency to connect people’s thoughts, emotions, and decisions into valence-matched mental state triads (thought valence = emotion valence = decision valence; such as, anticipate something bad + feel worried + avoid) and valence-matched mental state dyads (thought-emotion, thought-decision, and emotion-decision). Participants heard vignettes about focal characters who re-encountered individuals who had previously harmed them twice, helped them twice, or both harmed and helped them. Baseline trials involved no past experience. Children and adults predicted the focal characters’ thoughts (anticipate something good or bad), emotions (feel happy or worried), and decisions (go near or stay away). Results showed significant increases between 4 and 10 years in the formation of valence-matched mental state triads and dyads, with thoughts and emotions most often aligned by valence. We also documented age-related improvement in awareness that uncertain situations elicit less valence-consistent mental states than more certain situations, with females expecting weaker coherence among characters’ thoughts, emotions, and decisions than males. Controlling for age and sex, individuals with stronger executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) predicted more valence-aligned mental states. These findings add to the emerging literature on development and individual differences in children’s reasoning about mental states and emotions during middle childhood and beyond.

We used eye tracking to examine 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ (N = 173) visual attention to negative (anger, fear, sadness, disgust) and neutral faces when paired with happy faces in 2 experimental conditions: free-viewing (“look at the faces”) and directed (“look only at the happy faces”). Regardless of instruction, all age groups more often looked first to negative versus positive faces (no age differences), suggesting that initial orienting is driven by bottom-up processes. In contrast, biases in more sustained attention—last looks and looking duration—varied by age and could be modified by top-down instruction. On the free-viewing task, all age groups exhibited a negativity bias which attenuated with age and remained stable across trials. When told to look only at happy faces (directed task), all age groups shifted to a positivity bias, with linear age-related improvements. This ability to implement the “look only at the happy faces” instruction, however, fatigued over time, with the decrement stronger for children. Controlling for age, individual differences in executive function (working memory and inhibitory control) had no relation to the free-viewing task; however, these variables explained substantial variance on the directed task, with children and adults higher in executive function showing better skill at looking last and looking longer at happy faces. Greater anxiety predicted more first looks to angry faces on the directed task. These findings advance theory and research on normative development and individual differences in the bias to prioritize negative information, including contributions of bottom-up salience and top-down control.

The method of loci is a highly effective mnemonic that recruits existing salient memory for spatial locations and uses the information as a scaffold for remembering a list of items (Yates, 1966). One possible account for the effectiveness of the spatial method of loci comes from the perspective that it utilizes evolutionarily preserved mechanisms for spatial navigation within the hippocampus (Maguire et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398-4403, 2000; O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978; Rodriguez et al. in Brain Research Bulletin, 57(3), 499-503, 2002). Recently, though, neurons representing temporal information have also been described within the hippocampus (Eichenbaum in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(11), 732-744, 2014; Itskov, Curto, Pastalkova, & Buzsáki in The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(8), 2828-2834, 2011; MacDonald, Lepage, Eden, & Eichenbaum in Neuron, 71(4), 737-749, 2011; Mankin et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(47), 19462-19467, 2012; Meck, Church, & Matell in Behavioral Neuroscience, 127(5), 642, 2013), challenging the primacy of spatial-based functions to hippocampal processing. Given the presence of both spatial and temporal coding mechanisms within the hippocampus, we predicted that primarily temporal encoding strategies might also enhance memory. In two different experiments, we asked participants to learn lists of unrelated nouns using the (spatial) method of loci (i.e., the layout of their home as the organizing feature) or using two novel temporal methods (i.e., autobiographical memories or using the steps to making a sandwich). Participants' final free recall performance showed comparable boosts to the method of loci for both temporal encoding strategies, with all three scaffolding approaches demonstrating performance well above uninstructed free recall. Our findings suggest that primarily temporal representations can be used effectively to boost memory performance, comparable to spatial methods, with some caveats related to the relative ease with which participants appear to master the spatial versus temporal methods.

We examined an advanced form of emotion understanding in 4- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 264): Awareness that people’s minds generalize from past emotional episodes to bias how they feel, think, and make decisions in new situations. Participants viewed scenarios on an eye tracker, each featuring an initial perpetrator who caused a character to feel positively (P) and/or negatively (N) in 2-event sequences (NN, PP, NP, PN). Later, the character encountered a new agent who was highly similar to the initial perpetrator. Participants predicted the character’s affective reactions (emotions, thoughts, decisions) to the unknown agent while we recorded their eye movements to past episodes. Participants also judged characters’ emotions upon seeing additional agents, who differed in degree of similarity to the initial perpetrator. Four- to 5-year-olds discounted pasts with initial perpetrators—believing instead that characters would feel happy, anticipate good, and approach new agents. In contrast, adults exhibited robust beliefs that people generalize from past emotional experiences: They attributed more positive responses to new agents following PP > NP > PN > NN pasts, and they expected characters to have biased emotional reactions to even somewhat dissimilar new agents. Between 6 and 10 years, children increasingly assumed that the past would have a biasing impact; however, they drew stricter boundaries than did adults. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that all age groups attended to characters’ emotional past histories when reasoning about reactions to new agents (especially negative events), adults prioritized recent negative events in PN pasts, and participants’ attention biases to past event information correlated with their reasoning about emotion generalization.