Burns P, Atance C, O’Connor AP, McCormack T. The effects of cueing episodic future thinking on delay discounting in children, adolescents, and adults. Flashcards
delayed discounting=
Discounting the value of delayed rewards such that even a relatively small, immediately available reward is preferred to a larger delayed reward
Children are particularly steep discounters of delayed rewards as evidenced by delay of gratification studies.
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cueing individuals to imagine personal future events attenuates their discounting of delayed rewards
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resultaten van deze studie
In Experiment 1 we found that cueing future thinking had no effect on 8–11-year-olds’ (n = 177) delay discounting of either real or hypothetical rewards. In Experiment 2 we found that cueing adolescents (12–14-year-olds, n = 126) and adults (n = 122) to think about personal future events decreased their discounting of delayed rewards relative to three other conditions: a no cue control, an episodic memory condition and a novel ‘future other’ condition in which individuals imagine future events that might happen to a significant other person in their life. Cueing adults and adolescents to think about personal future events did not however affect how connected they felt to their future selves or their subjective sense of how close future time points felt to them – two constructs that have previously been shown to be related to delay discounting.
EFT=
episodic future thinking, imaginative pre-experiencing of personal future events
EFT and episodic memory both rely on a common core neural network, referred to as the ‘default network’
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doel van experiment 1
To know whether the effect of EFT cueing on delay discounting, previously demonstrated in adults and adolescents, extends to children.
wat was het doel van experiment 2
Second, we introduced a novel control condition (Experiment 2) to the study of adult and adolescent delay discounting – a ‘future other’ condition in which participants were cued to think about specific future events that would happen to a significant other person they know. Employing this control condition enabled us to examine whether cueing effects hinge specifically upon engaging in EFT (which by definition concerns one’s personal future), or instead result from more general future-oriented cognition.
wat was het derde doel van deze studie
And, third, we examined two possible mechanisms that might connect EFT cueing to decreased discounting:
(1) increased future self-connectedness and
(2) changes to one’s subjective sense of future time
wat wordt bedoeld met future time perception
the subjective perception of the temporal distance between the present and future time
points. When people make judgments about how far away different future time points feel subjectively, the relativ difference between them may not match the actual objective ratio. Rather, events farther away in time may seem closer together to one another than events in the near future. That is, there may be increasing compression of subjective time as objective time increases.
intertemporal decision making =
involves choices between reward options that differ in both magnitude and the time of their arrival
experiment 1 methode
Children completed two tasks assessing
intertemporal decision making: a delay choice task involving real rewards and a delay discounting task involving hypothetical monetary rewards, under one of three conditions.
- EFT condition: children were cued to think about events from personal future
- episodic memory condition: children were cued to think about past
- control condition: children were not cued
future time perception was measured by letting them pull a string from a box to indicate how far away four time points were to them.
first they did a delay choice task: were offered a choice between a low value reward (1 van het item) available immediately, and a high value reward (2 van het item) available after a delay. they had to choose.
- with EFT: imagine visiting grandma next week (daarna de vraag of ze 20 pound volgende week willen, of 10 pound nu).
then they were tested on the delay discounting task, with hypothetical monetary rewards.
Our main finding was that cueing children to think about events either from their personal future or past prior to making intertemporal decisions had no effect on their propensity to discount delayed rewards.
This was true for both a delay choice task involving real rewards and a delay discounting task with hypothetical monetary rewards.
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hoe meetten ze bij exp 2 de future self-connectedness en future time perception
- future self-connectedness: compare the person they are in the present, to the person they will be 1 year in the future. then asked to judge how much they overlap.
- future time perception: . On each trial, participants were presented with two interlocking cogs placed inside a small square. The experimenter explained that the participant’s task was to think about how far away different times in the future feel to them. To do so they would position the cursor in the square on the screen and press and hold to indicate how far each time point felt
They indicate that EFT cueing is ineffective before adolescence, at least as typically employed in the context of delay discounting studies. It remains to be seen whether modifications of cueing techniques may be possible that are effective when used with children. By adolescence, such effects are robust, and we found that they were observable only when theoretically significant cues were used that specifically involved EFT. However, we found no evidence for two plausible hypotheses about the mechanism underpinning EFT cueing – that such cueing affects the degree to which participants feel connected to their future selves, or that it affects the subjective distance of future points in time
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