Examining temporal orientation without narrative construction in young and older adults

The tendency of older adults to imagine personal future events in less detail than young adults may be due to age-related differences in temporal orientation and/or to differences in the ability to construct narratives of future events. To test these hypotheses, we examined differences in temporal construal (the tendency to imagine events in the near future more concretely and in greater detail than events in the distant future) with tasks that require temporal orientation but not narrative construction. In two experiments, groups of young adults (Study 1, n = 32; Study 2, n = 138) and older adults (Study 1, n = 30; Study 2, n = 133) completed two measures sensitive to manipulations of imagined temporal orientation: measures of personal agency and of self-efficacy. Participants made these judgments while imagining themselves either in the near future or in the distant future. Like young adults, older adults gave higher ratings of personal agency and reported greater self-efficacy for events imagined in the distant future than for those in the near future. These findings indicate that the shift from concrete to abstract thinking when imagining near- vs. distant-future events, previously reported in young adults, also occurs in older adults despite age-related reductions in episodic future imagining.