An advantage for ownership over preferences in children’s future thinking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children’s inferences about their future preferences with judgments about their future ownership. In Experiment 1, we show that 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 120) exhibit an ownership advantage in their future thinking—they are better able to indicate which objects they will own as adults than to indicate which they will prefer. We propose 2 explanations for this finding. First, children may rely more heavily on their semantic knowledge when inferring ownership than when inferring preferences, allowing them to sidestep the difficult task of mentally projecting themselves into the future. Second, ownership inferences may involve less conflict than preference inferences (e.g., conflict between a child’s present and future desires). In Experiment 2, we test these accounts by comparing 3-year-olds’ (N = 120) judgments about their own future ownership and preferences with judgments about what a present adult owns and prefers. We replicate the ownership advantage from Experiment 1 and further find that the ownership advantage holds when reasoning about a present adult. Our findings therefore support the conflict account, suggesting children struggle to infer what they will prefer as adults because their present and future preferences are in conflict.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".