Let's Be Spontaneous: Older, But Not Younger, Preschoolers Independently Prepare for a Future Problem
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Young children can be prompted to engage in future-oriented behaviour (e.g., bringing an item to a future event); however it is unclear when they can do so spontaneously . The shift from prompted to spontaneous future-oriented behaviour reflects children's ability to independently and adaptively use their thoughts about the future to guide their actions. We examined spontaneous future-oriented behaviour by adapting the popular “Spoon” task ( Tulving, 2005 ) of future thinking. Four- to 9-year-olds ( N = 133) were tested virtually in their homes and shown three crying babies; soothing the babies required a spoon, which the children did not have. Children were later told they would re-encounter the babies and were given the opportunity to spontaneously retrieve a spoon: our dependent variable of interest. Children who did not retrieve a spoon were given increasingly specific prompts, ending with a forced-choice selection. Fifty-three percent of children spontaneously retrieved a spoon; with age, children were more likely to be spontaneous, τ b = 0.149, p = .038, r 2 = 0.054, and require less prompting, r s (61) = 0.501, p < .001. Spontaneous performance was significantly correlated to performance on an event-based prospective memory task, r partial (128) = 0.243, p = .005, while prompted performance was significantly correlated to performance on a working memory task, r partial (51) = 0.375, p = .006. These findings suggest an age-related improvement in children's capacity to spontaneously prepare for the future, and that its cognitive underpinnings differ from those involved in more prompted future-oriented behaviour.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it