The development of mental scenario building and episodic foresight

Abstract

Episodic foresight is the future-directed counterpart of episodic memory. It is a sophisticated, potentially uniquely human capacity, with tremendous adaptive consequences. Here we review what is currently known about its development through early childhood. We tackle this from two distinct perspectives. First, we present the first systematic evaluation of the development of purported components of mental scenario building as highlighted by a theater metaphor: the stage, the playwright, the set, the actors, the director, the executive producer, and the broadcaster. We find that, although there are diverse developmental trajectories, by 4 years of age children have acquired the basic cognitive components required to mentally construct specific future events. Second, we examine recent attempts to test children's episodic foresight more directly and find that results are in line with those examining the development of required components. This is not to say that children younger than four have no inkling of upcoming events or that older children have nothing left to learn about constructing the future. Episodic foresight, and its neurocognitive foundations, continues to develop throughout childhood.

Children’s and Apes’ Preparatory Responses to Two Mutually Exclusive Possibilities

“…Unlike our minimalist task, however, the tasks used in these previous studies relied heavily on language comprehension and included complex intermediate steps between the preparatory behavior and the future outcome. Our results more comfortably place the capacity to prepare for immediate alternative futures on a similar developmental trajectory to other future-oriented behaviors [8,12], such as the abilities to delay gratification [13,14], to select an appropriate object to solve a future problem [15,16], and to save resources for the future [17].…”

“…Adult humans are particularly adept at dealing with environmental uncertainty, being able to mentally represent multiple, even mutually exclusive versions of the future and prepare accordingly. This capacity is fundamental to many complex future-oriented behaviors [6,7], yet little is known about when it develops in children [8] and whether it is shared with non-human animals [9]. Here we show that children become able to insightfully prepare for two mutually exclusive versions of an undetermined future event during the middle preschool years, whereas we find no evidence for such a capacity in a sample of chimpanzees and orangutans.…”

Beyond bodily anticipation: Internal simulations in social interaction

“…This is similar to the idea of a "virtual space in our minds able to entertain offline representations" (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007;Suddendorf & Redshaw, 2013). Episodic simulation, in this sense, refers to the phenomenological sense of being able to imagine yourself in the future, including both the ability to generate sensory percepts in different modalities and connect these into a coherent and complex situation description (Hassabis & Maguire, 2007), and the ability to project yourself into the future (Buckner & Carroll, 2007).…”

“…Humans frequently engage in prospection, sometimes more than one hundred times a day (D'Argembeau et al, 2011). An interesting developmental proposition is that the propensity to use prospective thought is influenced by parents talking to their children about future events (Hudson, 2006;Suddendorf, 2010), and that cultural artefacts related to time, such as clocks or calenders, may further scaffold such thinking (Suddendorf & Redshaw, 2013).…”

Learning from the future meets Bateson’s levels of learning

“…Related to this is the concept of "learning from an envisioned future" (Suddendorf and Redshaw, 2013;Kaiser et al, 2015b) that enhances imagination to mentally pre-experience hypothetical future scenarios and personal events (Szpunar, 2010, p. 143). An example for learning from an envisioned future could be to envision how a desirable outcome of a project could look like and, by using a backcasting approach (Robinson, 1990;Dreborg, 1996), to explore what actions are needed in the present situation to reach this desirable state.…”