NSF funds new research on children’s future-oriented reasoning
Kristin H. Lagattuta (Primary Investigator) was awarded a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate development and individual differences in children's reasoning about future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions.
Public Abstract:
Since we never know for certain what will happen in the future, we often base our expectations for what we think might happen on what has occurred in the past. This ability to bridge the past to the future is a fundamental component of adult social cognition critical for assessing risk, making decisions, and understanding others. Very little is known, however, about how young children evaluate risk, what meaning they think past events forecast for the future, or about how they reason about future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions. The goal of this project is to investigate the development of this knowledge in children between the ages of 4 and 8 years and to compare their reasoning to that of adults. This research further investigates whether visual attention to and reasoning about connections between the past and the future predict children’s worry and anxiety. Since these symptoms are more prevalent in females versus males, gender differences will also be assessed.
Children and adults will be presented with scenarios involving characters that encounter a person or animal that they have had multiple experiences with in the past: current situations involving low risk (two positive past events), high risk (two negative past events), and ambiguous risk (a positive and a negative past event). Illustrations will be displayed on an eye-tracking monitor so that participants’ visual attention—how long they attend to a particular source of information—can be quantified. Participants will make judgments about characters’ thoughts about the likelihood of future events, emotions, and action decisions. Beliefs about the degree to which people generalize from past experiences to similar category members will also be examined. Worry and anxiety symptoms will be assessed via parent- and self-report. Hypotheses tested include: (1) between the ages of 4 and 8 years children will increasingly attend to past history information and differentiate by risk situation when making judgments about people’s future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions, (2) participants that look longer at negative versus positive information (negative attention bias) will more frequently predict that characters will anticipate higher likelihood of harm, more intense worries, more preventative and avoidant decisions, and greater generalization from past trauma (negative reasoning bias), (3) negative attention and reasoning biases will predict greater worry and anxiety symptoms, and (4) females will be more likely than males to display negative attention and reasoning biases.
Results from this research will forge new directions and build essential bridges between developmental and adult research on judgment and decision making. The incorporation of eye-tracking technology will yield informative data about processes involved in reasoning about past-to-future connections, especially associations between real-time attention to negative versus positive information and verbal judgments. This research will also provide critical insight into attention and reasoning biases that may place individuals, especially females, at increased risk for worry and anxiety.
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