Professor Teresa McCormack, Queen's University Belfast

Host: Dr Michaela Gummerum

Title: Future thinking and delay discounting in children and adolescents

Abstract:

The difficulties that children and adolescents have with delaying gratification is well-documented. Recent research with adults has suggested that episodic future thinking skills – the ability to imagine future personal events - may play a role in facilitating prudent choice. However, there is almost no developmental evidence linking episodic future thinking skills to children’s performance on delay discounting tasks. In this talk I will present a series of correlational studies examining whether there is such a link, with a wide age range of participants (from 4-year-olds to adolescents and adults). I will also describe a parallel set of studies that have examined whether priming future thinking can affect discounting of future rewards in this age range. The findings suggest that a link between episodic future thinking and delay discounting emerges only in adolescence when future thinking skills are well-established. However, we found some evidence to suggest that delay discounting in children is linked to their judgments about how far away points in time in the future feel to them. These findings have implications for how the role of future thinking in facilitating prudent choice is conceptualized.