A five-minute chat with preschoolers about their past or future selves helps them make better decisions

By Christian Jarrett There could be an Arctic blizzard blowing outside for all little Mary cares. The fact is, she’s hot from running around indoors, and no matter how much you try to explain to Mary that her future self – the one that’s about to go walking in the cold – would really appreciate that she put her coat on, Mary, like most kids aged under five, finds it very difficult to step outside of the present and consider her future needs. While psychologists have already spent a lot of time demonstrating the limitations of young children’s ability to plan for the future, until now they’ve not looked much at whether it’s possible to target these “prospective abilities”. However, a new study in Developmental Psychology has done that, showing that a mere five-minute chat about their recent past or future selves seems to help preschoolers remember to do things in the future, and to “time travel” mentally, so that they make better decisions about their forthcoming needs. Nadia Chernyak at Boston University and her colleagues allocated 81 children, aged three to five, to one of four training conditions. Each child spent five minutes alone with a researcher talking and thinking about either: their self in the near past (for example, what they’d been doing earlier that day, and drawing a picture of themselves going to bed the previous night); their near future (such as what they would be doing later that day...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Decision making Developmental Educational Source Type: blogs