Designing Methods to Improve Preschoolers' Future-Oriented Reasoning

Abstract

The current dissertation explores two novel means of promoting psychological distance (i.e., shifting perspective away from the present self) to facilitate preschoolers' reasoning about the distant future. These interventions included pretending to be another person during decision making (Study 1) and visually scaffolding preschoolers' projections of the future self during decision making (Study 2). Across both studies and their associated experiments, preschoolers' abilities to reason about the distant future (i.e., adulthood) were assessed using the Preferences task (Bélanger et al., 2014). In Study 1, 3- to 5-year-olds were asked to "pretend" to be another same-aged child (Experiment 1A) or adult (Experiment 1B) while making decisions regarding their preferences in adulthood. Comparison groups included preschoolers who were asked to choose for another person (i.e., Peer condition) or for themselves (i.e., Self condition). Although we predicted that pretending would encourage preschoolers to predict a future preference for adult items more often than children who chose for the self, results showed that neither pretending to be another child nor pretending to be another adult achieved this. Instead, the Peer condition was the only condition in which preschoolers selected the adult item over the child item more often than chance. Discussion of these findings include the boundaries of perspective taking as a means of facilitating psychological distance and the broader implications regarding pretense abilities in early childhood.

In Study 2, we explored whether reinforcing preschoolers' mental projections of the future self using a visual storybook would allow them to reason better about their future preferences in adulthood. In Experiment 1, prior to completing the Preferences task, 3- to 5-year-olds were read a storybook about their future adult self (Self-Future Storybook) living a prototypical day in adulthood. Performance in this intervention group was compared to children who were read a similar storybook involving a generic adult character (i.e., Adult Storybook) and a control group. In Experiment 2, 4- and 5-year-olds were read a modified story (Embedded Self-Future Storybook) in which the test trials of the Preferences task were included within the original storybook narrative (i.e., rather than presenting them in a subsequent testing block). Performance on this intervention was compared against control groups. Although preschoolers' performance in the Self-Future Storybook improved significantly with age in months (compared to the control group), this effect was not detected when trial items were embedded within the storybook (i.e., Embedded Self-Future Storybook). This suggests that storybooks may be a useful tool for facilitating older preschoolers' reasoning about the distant future, but that such abilities are yet fragile in early childhood.

Overall, the findings from these studies highlight the challenges and limitations of perspective taking interventions as a means of improving preschoolers' reasoning about the distant future. Moreover, this dissertation contributes to research in this area by providing novel approaches to facilitating perspective taking, including a new tool for visually representing events in the distant future. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.