Episodic Foresight For Self And Other In 3-to 5.5-year-old Children

Episodic foresight(EF)refers to the ability that individuals project themselves into a particular time and place to pre-experience a possible event in the future.It is the future-orientation aspect of the mental time travel.According to the existing theoretical assumptions,scene construction(the ability to bind multimodal elements of a scene in mind together depending on hippocampus)and self-projection(the ability to mentally project oneself through time relying on prefrontal cortex)can be used to explain the mechanism underlying episodic foresight.From the viewpoint of developmental psyghology,the process of scene construction,or episodic memory,indeed plays an important role in the process of episodic foresight.But researchers have found that the role of self organization(self-projection)on episodic foresight is not obvious in the primary school until adolescence.Some research shows that 4-year-old is an important period for the emergence of episodic foresight.Then,how does episodic foresight process and operate for children of this age? How does the role of self-organization on episodic foresight demonstrate?The present study compared the performance of children in the self perspective of episodic foresight tasks(involving scene construction and self-projection)and that in others’ perspective of the foresight tasks(only referring to the scene construction),attempts to study the possible influence of self-projection on episodic foresight in young children.Because children at different ages have different characteristics in the process of integrating different perspectives,we can also compare and analyze the children of different ages separately.The present study included three parts.Study 1 selected 124 children aged 3-4years old to participate in the experiment.Half of them completed the tasks from their own perspective,and others did the same tasks from the perspective of others.In study2,112 children aged 5-5.5-year-old completed the same tasks as experiment 1.Study 3integrated the data of the first two studies,to describe a develomental trajectory in children from 3 years old to 5.5 years old.By comparing the behavioral performance and speech explanations in episodic foresight task,we could find that:(1)Overall,children made judgments on episodic foresight for others better than did it for themselves.That is to say,the imperfect self-projection in young children may had a negative impact on the episodic foresight.(2)Compared to the self perspective,children of 3 years old chose more correct options from others’ perspective in the foresight tasks;while children of 5.5 years old not only behaved more appropriately,but also gave more reasonable explanations from others’ perspective than did it from self perspective.(3)Children’s abilities to anticipate the situation from the perspective of self and others development with the increase of age.