Abstract

The trip task has been used as a verbal test for examining preschool children’s episodic future thinking. However, the only existing study using the trip task merely examined 3-year-olds. In order to investigate how future projections develop, we examined a total of 241 preschool children in three age groups (35-, 47-, and 55-month-olds). As expected, the results revealed a developmental progression with the older children outperforming their younger peers. The obtained results correspond to existing evidence using behavioral tasks, and thereby underscores the robustness of previous findings showing that the ability to project oneself into the future undergoes a marked development from 3 to 5 years of age. In addition, and more specifically, the results presented here when considered together with other evidence, may suggest a hitherto neglected developmental spurt from around 3.5- to 4-years of age in relation to episodic future thinking, calling for further research in this age range.

摘要

旅行任务已被用作检查学龄前儿童情景未来思维的口头测试。然而，现有的唯一一项使用旅行任务的研究仅检查了 3 岁的孩子。为了调查未来预测如何发展，我们检查了三个年龄组（35 个月、47 个月和 55 个月大）的总共 241 名学龄前儿童。正如预期的那样，结果显示了年龄较大的孩子的发展进步超过了他们的年轻同龄人。获得的结果与使用行为任务的现有证据相对应，从而强调了先前研究结果的稳健性，表明将自己投射到未来的能力在 3 至 5 岁期间经历了显着发展。此外，更具体地说，这里提出的结果与其他证据一起考虑时，