Young children's ability to distinguish past and future changes in physical and mental states

Grant, Janie Busby; Suddendorf, Thomas

doi:10.1348/026151009x482930

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Preschoolers are still learning to reason about the causal significance of whether an event is in the past or the future (Grant & Suddendorf, 2010;Zhang & Hudson, 2018) and getting to grips with locating and ordering events in time (Friedman, 1989(Friedman, , 2005Hoerl & McCormack, 2019). Thus, the pattern of performance observed in this age group may reflect a genuine difference in the significance preschoolers attach to an experience being in the past versus the future.…”

Section: Discussion Of Experiments 1a and 1bmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Preschool children use tensed language appropriately (Harner, 1976;Weist, Wysocka, & Lyytinen, 1991) and are able to episodically remember the past and imagine the future (Coughlin, Lyons, & Ghetti, 2014;Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011). However, children of this age are just starting to get to grips with the way events are ordered in time (Friedman, 2005;Hoerl & McCormack, 2019), and with the causal significance an event's being located in the past versus the future has for the present (Grant & Suddendorf, 2010;Zhang & Hudson, 2018). Preschoolers frequently make errors when locating and ordering events within time, particularly when reasoning about future, as opposed to past events (McColgan & McCormack, 2008;McCormack & Hanley, 2011), and the ability to think hypothetically about the future and counterfactually about the past continues to develop in important ways into middle childhood (Beck, Robinson, Carroll, & Apperly, 2006;Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010).…”

Section: Developmental Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past–Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

et al. 2020

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It seems self‐evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past–future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.

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Section: Discussion Of Experiments 1a and 1bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Developmental Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past–Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

et al. 2020

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“…Further, children struggle to grasp the differing causal implications of events from "yesterday" vs. "tomorrow" on the present until at least age 5, also suggesting that their understanding of the distinction between past and future is incomplete (Busby & Suddendorf, 2010). Together, these results suggest that children may first learn that deictic time words label periods in time, without understanding much about their deictic past/future status, order, or remoteness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Today is tomorrow’s yesterday: Children’s acquisition of deictic time words

Tillman

Marghetis

Barner

et al. 2017

Cognitive Psychology

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Deictic time words like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" pose a challenge to children not only because they are abstract, and label periods in time, but also because their denotations vary according to the time at which they are uttered: Monday's "tomorrow" is different than Thursday's. Although children produce these words as early as age 2 or 3, they do not use them in adult-like ways for several subsequent years. Here, we explored whether children have partial but systematic meanings for these words during the long delay before adult-like usage. We asked 3- to 8-year-olds to represent these words on a bidirectional, left-to-right timeline that extended from the past (infancy) to the future (adulthood). This method allowed us to independently probe knowledge of these words' deictic status (e.g., "yesterday" is in the past), relative ordering (e.g., "last week" was before "yesterday"), and remoteness from the present (e.g., "last week" was about 7 times longer ago than "yesterday"). We found that adult-like knowledge of deictic status and order emerge in synchrony, between ages 4 and 6, but that knowledge of remoteness emerges later, after age 7. Our findings suggest that children's early use of deictic time words is not random, but instead reflects the gradual construction of a structured lexical domain.

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“…Young children, especially those aged four and under, have considerable trouble understanding and correctly using specific future-oriented terms (Harner, 1975, 1980; Busby Grant and Suddendorf, 2010, 2011). Therefore, informing them that their choice of an item will have an effect when they go to another room in “five minutes” or play a game “tomorrow” (e.g., Russell et al, 2010) would be futile for a large proportion of young children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

Redshaw¹,

Suddendorf²

2013

Front. Psychol.

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Previous experiments have demonstrated that by 4 years of age children can use information from a past episode to solve a problem for the very next future episode. However, it remained unclear whether 4-year-olds can similarly use such information to solve a problem for a more removed future episode that is not of immediate concern. In the current study we introduced 4-year-olds to problems in one room before taking them to another room and distracting them for 15 min. The children were then offered a choice of items to place into a bucket that was to be taken back to the first room when a 5-min sand-timer had completed a cycle. Across two conceptually distinct domains, the children placed the item that could solve the deferred future problem above chance level. This result demonstrates that by 48 months many children can recall a problem from the past and act in the present to solve that problem for a deferred future episode. We discuss implications for theories about the nature of episodic foresight.

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Young children's ability to distinguish past and future changes in physical and mental states

Cited by 25 publications

References 93 publications

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past–Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

Pain in the Past and Pleasure in the Future: The Development of Past–Future Preferences for Hedonic Goods

Today is tomorrow’s yesterday: Children’s acquisition of deictic time words

Foresight beyond the very next event: four-year-olds can link past and deferred future episodes

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