“These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty”: Older Children and Adults Struggle With Induced‐State Episodic Foresight

Abstract

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.

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

“…As expected, no effect of age on pretzel task performance was found when 3‐ to 7‐year‐olds were asked to predict their own future preference. This finding is consistent with past studies that have also found no age‐related improvements in pretzel task performance between 3 years old and young adulthood (Atance & Meltzoff, ; Cheke & Clayton, ; Kramer et al, ; Mahy et al, ). Interestingly, many other episodic foresight tasks where present and future states do not conflict show age‐related improvements during the preschool years (e.g., Atance & Jackson, ; Suddendorf & Busby, ), suggesting that current‐future state conflict may pose special difficulty for making accurate future predictions.…”

“…In the current study, low levels of performance on the pretzel task for self and other could, at least partially, be explained by children's general lack of understanding of physiological states. Yet children's at chance performance on the pretzel task for other compared with below chance performance for self suggest some support for the current‐state bias explanation (e.g., Kramer et al, ; Mahy, ).…”

“…Past work has shown that the amount of water children drink is positively related to their future preference for water (Atance & Meltzoff, ; Mahy, ) and that non‐thirsty children (who do not eat pretzels) drink less water than children who have consumed pretzels (Atance & Meltzoff, ). Notably, no developmental increases have been documented in the Pretzel task from age three to adulthood (Atance & Meltzoff, ; Cheke & Clayton, ; Kramer, Goldfarb, Tashjian, & Lagattuta, ; Mahy, ). This lack of age‐related change in Pretzel task performance suggests that both children and adults' episodic foresight is negatively affected by direct conflict between a current and future state.…”

Learning for the future: children’s capacity to acquire information and skills in preparation for a future event

“…In particular, children's ability to both generate future mental scenarios and imbue these scenarios with rich contextual details has been shown to increase gradually between 5 and 11 years of age (Coughlin, Lyons, & Ghetti, 2014;Coughlin, Robins, & Ghetti, 2017), and there are continued age-related improvements in the richness of imagined events through to at least ages 14 to 16 years (Gott & Lah, 2014). Furthermore, recent studies (Atance & Meltzoff, 2006;Kramer, Goldfarb, Tashjian, & Lagattuta, 2017;Mahy, Grass, Wagner, & Kliegel, 2014) have revealed that affective and motivational aspects of episodic foresight, like the ability to accurately anticipate future desires and feelings, may be late developing. For example, Mahy et al found that 7-yearolds performed no better than 3-year-olds at predicting a future desire that differed from a current one.…”

“…In general, children as young as 4 years old have shown competence on tasks in which they are prompted to consider the future by being forced to select an item or through questioning (e.g., Atance & Meltzoff, 2005;Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011;Payne, Taylor, Hayne, & Scarf, 2014;Suddendorf, Nielsen, & von Gehlen, 2011). However, recent studies show preschoolers perform rather poorly on tasks requiring them to self-generate future scenarios (Coughlin et al, 2014), spontaneously save for the future (Metcalf & Atance, 2011), and consider future desires that differ from current ones (Atance & Meltzoff, 2005;Kramer, Goldfarb, Tashjian, & Lagattuta, 2017;Mahy et al, 2014).…”