Novel ways to measure future-oriented cognition: Using parent-report measures and open-ended responses to explore young children’s future thinking development

Abstract

Future-oriented cognition encompasses a set of key abilities that children must develop for successful functioning in daily life including, saving, prospective memory, episodic foresight, planning, and delay of gratification. These future thinking abilities are supported by memory systems (e.g., semantic, episodic), as well as constructive processes, self-projection, and executive functions. Research primarily measures young children’s future-oriented abilities through behavioural tasks, which have various limitations and may not engage future thinking. The current studies introduce new methods to overcome some of these limitations: developing a parent-report questionnaire and examining children’s open-ended responses. In Study 1 (N = 101; Mazachowsky & Mahy, 2020), 3-to 7-year-old’s future thinking was examined to establish the psychometric properties of a new parent-report measure, The Children’s Future Thinking Questionnaire (CFTQ). The CFTQ detected development of children’s future thinking and is a reliable and valid measure. Study 2 (N = 48; Mazachowsky et al., 2020) examined 3-to 5-year-old children’s episodic foresight using a novel, open-ended version of the Picture-book task. Results showed that children were able to generate items for future use and were more successful with age. Children’s explanations for their generated items were typically present-focused and included both episodic and semantic details. Expanding on Study 2, Study 3 (N = 158; Mazachowsky et al., revisions requested) explored 3-to 5-year-old’s explanations for their item choices on two episodic foresight tasks to determine the degree to which these tasks engaged children’s episodic and future-oriented processes. Children provided more future-oriented explanations on the Picture-book task compared to the Spoon task, but episodicity did not differ between tasks. Further, children’s Picture-book task explanations included more first-person personal pronouns compared to the Spoon task, but explanations did not differ in other pronoun use. Together, these studies show that use of a parent-report measure and examination of children’s open-ended responses offer unique insight into the development of young children’s future thinking and engagement in future-oriented processes.