Preschoolers' Saving: A Behavioural Manifestation of Episodic Foresight

The aim of this dissertation was to develop a novel behavioural method to assess young children’s capacity for episodic foresight. Specifically, I developed a marble game paradigm to assess whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children would save marbles for future enjoyment. Study 1 demonstrated that preschoolers will save more spontaneously when they can draw on a recent past experience compared to when the context is completely novel. Results from study 1 also suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. Study 2 revealed that providing children with a verbal prompt alerting them to their possible courses of action (i.e., saving or spending) facilitated saving, that 5-year-olds saved more than 3-year-olds, and that children’s performance on this behavioural (i.e., nonverbal) measure of saving was independent of their language proficiency. Children’s saving was not associated with other capacities hypothesized to relate to episodic foresight (theory of mind, inhibitory control, and working memory). Implications for children's saving, the development of episodic foresight, and future research are discussed. PRESCHOOLERS’ SAVING 1 Preschoolers’ Saving: A Behavioural Manifestation of Episodic Foresight There has been a surge of research in the last decade on humans’ capacity for episodic foresight: the cognitive process that allows humans to mentally project themselves forward in time. The main goal of my doctoral research was to develop a novel behavioural paradigm to assess young children’s capacity for episodic foresight. More specifically, children’s saving behaviour became my phenomenon of interest for two reasons. First, human saving behaviour, defined here as “reserving resources for future enjoyment” (Metcalf & Atance, 2011), arguably reflects or at least involves episodic foresight. Second, research on young children’s capacity for saving is noticeably absent from the developmental literature. To address this gap in the literature, I developed a marble game paradigm to assess whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (i.e., “preschoolers”) would save marbles for future enjoyment. The specific research questions for this dissertation were as follows (1) Will preschoolers save spontaneously (i.e., without being prompted to do so) in a novel context that involves opportunities to “spend” in the present? (2) Will preschoolers save more spontaneously when they can draw on a recent past experience (i.e., in a familiar context) compared to when the context is completely novel? (3) Will preschoolers save less when spending (i.e., using marbles) in the anticipated future context will yield less enjoyment than spending in the present? (4) Does providing children with a verbal prompt alerting them to their possible courses of action (i.e., saving or spending) facilitate saving? (5) Is preschoolers’ saving associated with other capacities purportedly related to episodic foresight including, theory of mind (ToM), inhibitory control (IC), and working memory (WM)? (6) Is preschoolers’ performance on this behavioural (i.e., nonverbal) measure of saving independent of their language proficiency? (7) Does saving increase with age among 3to 5-year-olds? PRESCHOOLERS’ SAVING 2 Organization of the Introduction I begin by discussing why saving is an important topic for empirical investigation, followed by an overview of the small body of previous research on specific forms of saving among children. Next, I introduce the topic of episodic foresight more broadly, beginning with an overview of relevant terminology and the conceptualization of the construct. A review of previous research on episodic foresight follows, focusing most heavily on methods designed to assess this capacity in young children. Finally, I discuss the limitations of previous developmental studies of episodic foresight and how certain existing methods inspired the development of the new paradigm that is the focus of this dissertation.