Development of short- and long-term preference understanding from the perspective of oneself and another

Episodic future thinking – imagining a hypothetical future – may benefit from adopting another person's perspective (i.e., psychological distance). Psychological distance has been shown to improve decision making in children on a variety of tasks requiring episodic future thinking. This work explores how children imagine their short- and long-term future preferences from the perspective of themselves or a peer using behavioral and eye tracking measures. 129 children were tested (27 2-year-olds, M=31.26 months; 39 3-year-olds, M=42.18 months; 31 4-year-olds, M=54.06 months; 32 5-year-olds, M=63.53 months). The experiment modified the preferences task (Bélanger et al., 2014), where the long-term condition involved imagining what one (or a peer) would like when they are grown up and the short-term condition involved imagining what one (or a peer) would like tonight. In both cases, children selected between two items: in the long-term, adult versus child items; in the short-term, nighttime versus daytime items. Children's performance improved with age in both short- and long-term conditions. The long-term condition was more difficult than the short-term condition, with even 4–5-year-olds performing at chance whereas in the short-term condition, 4–5-year-olds performed close to ceiling. A significant interaction was found between the temporal (long-term and short-term) conditions and the perspective (oneself or another) conditions whereby children benefited from thinking from a peer's perspective only in the long-term. In the short-term condition, performance when utilizing one's own and another's perspective did not significantly differ. Eye tracking was overall consistent with children's verbal answers, validating children's explicit understanding of their future preferences.