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Thinking about the future: Comparing children's forced-choice versus "generative" responses in the "spoon test"
Cristina M Atance1, Seyda Nur Celebi1, Sarah Mitchinson2
1School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
Insights
Young children
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Child Psychology
Background:
- Children's foresight is often assessed using the "spoon test," where they select an item to solve a problem.
- Previous research indicates 3- and 4-year-olds typically succeed in selecting the correct item.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if increasing the "generative" demands of the spoon test impacts young children's performance.
- To explore the relationship between verbally generating future-oriented solutions and category fluency skills in children.
Main Methods:
- An adapted "spoon test" was used with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N=99 in Experiment 1, N=48 in Experiment 2).
- Tasks were varied to increase generative requirements, moving from selection to verbal generation of the correct item.
- Children's performance was compared across different task demands and correlated with category fluency.
Main Results:
- Children's performance significantly decreased as the generative requirements of the task increased.
- Verbal generation of the correct item in the spoon test appeared more reliant on category fluency than item selection.
Conclusions:
- Young children's ability to think about the future is sensitive to task demands, particularly when generation is required.
- Future research should explore more generative forms of future thinking in early childhood development.
Abstract:
One of the most popular methods to assess children's foresight is to present children with a problem (e.g., locked box with no key) in one room and then later, in another room, give them the opportunity to select the item (e.g., key) that will solve it. Whether or not children choose the correct item to bring back to the first room is the dependent measure of interest in this "spoon test." Although children as young as 3 or 4 years typically succeed on this test, whether they would pass a more stringent version in which they must verbally generate (vs. select) the correct item in the absence of any cues is unknown. This is an important point given that humans must often make decisions about the future without being explicitly "prompted" by the future-oriented option. In Experiment 1, using an adapted version of the spoon test, we show that as the "generative" requirements of the task increase, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 99) performance significantly decreases. We replicate this effect in Experiment 2 (N = 48 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) and also provide preliminary evidence that the capacity to verbally generate the correct item in a spoon test may draw more heavily on children's category fluency skills than does their capacity to select this item among a set of distracters. Our findings underscore the importance of examining more generative forms of future thought in young children.