Children’s mental time travel into the future: a functional perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children’s episodic future-thinking is typically assessed using experimental tasks that measure whether children select an item with future utility. Although these tasks—inspired by Tulving’s seminal ‘spoon test’ (Tulving E. 2005 Episodic memory and autonoesis: uniquely human? In The missing link in cognition: origins of self-reflective consciousness [eds HS Terrace, J Metcalfe], pp. 3–56. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161564.001.0001])—are passed around age 4, they tell us little about the functional significance of children’s episodic future-thinking in their day-to-day lives. We highlight how a naturalistic approach can shed light on this issue, and present a small study where we recruited mothers to report on their children’s ( N = 12, 3- and 4-year-olds and 6- and 7-year-olds) future-thinking over a 7-day period. We used a thematic analysis to understand why children express future thoughts and derived the following themes: (1) expressing future desires and/or intentions, (2) future-oriented information-seeking, (3) connecting present actions with future outcomes, and (4) predicting future mental/physiological states. We compare these themes with recent accounts of the functional significance of future-thinking in adults and conclude that children largely express their future-thinking verbally to request information or support from their parent—likely because they do not yet possess enough control/autonomy to independently act for their own future. Our findings both complement and extend an experimental approach and further elucidate the functional significance of mental time travel in children. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research’.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".