Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved based solely on representations of the present. To overcome this limitation, we modified an existing task such that children could not simply rely on a representation of the present to succeed (i.e., the correct answer for "right now" was different than the correct answer for "tomorrow"). A sample of 117 4- to 7-year-olds (64 girls and 53 boys) from Ottawa, Canada, and surrounding area, who were predominantly European Canadian (78.6% of sample) and had a family income of over $100,000 CAN (66.1% of sample) participated. Children remembered the information required to solve our task, and there were age-related changes in performance, but only 7-year-olds made an adaptive future-oriented decision significantly more often than chance. With the task modification removed (so the correct answer for the present and the future was the same), even 4-year-olds were above chance. Our work challenges the notion that starting at age 4, children solve behavioral tasks of future thinking by acting on their representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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明天将有所不同：孩子们在思考未来时有能力介入一项干预性事件。

面向未来的思想在人类中无处不在，但是对儿童的学习却充满了挑战。成人不仅考虑未来，还可以代表与现在不同的未来世界。但是，传统上并不需要儿童去评估未来思想发展的行为任务，因为大多数任务可以仅基于当下的表现来解决。为了克服此限制，我们修改了现有任务，使孩子们不能简单地依靠现在的表现来成功（即，“现在”的正确答案与“明天”的正确答案不同）。抽取了来自加拿大渥太华及周边地区的117位4至7岁的年龄段（分别为64名女孩和53名男孩），其中以欧洲加拿大裔为主（样本的78.6％），家庭收入超过$ 100，000 CAN（样本的66.1％）参加了会议。孩子们记得解决我们任务所需的信息，并且表现与年龄相关，但只有7岁的孩子做出适应性未来目标的决定比偶然发生的机会明显更多。删除任务修改后（对于现在和将来的正确答案是相同的），即使是4岁的孩子也没有机会。我们的工作挑战了这样一种观念，即从4岁开始，孩子们通过表现自己对未来的表现来解决未来思维的行为任务。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。但只有7岁的孩子做出适应性的，面向未来的决策的机会比偶然的机会要多得多。删除任务修改后（对于现在和将来的正确答案是相同的），即使是4岁的孩子也没有机会。我们的工作挑战了这样一种观念，即从4岁开始，孩子们通过表现自己对未来的表现来解决未来思维的行为任务。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。但只有7岁的孩子做出适应性的，面向未来的决策的机会比偶然的机会要多得多。删除任务修改后（对于现在和将来的正确答案是相同的），即使是4岁的孩子也没有机会。我们的工作挑战了这样一种观念，即从4岁开始，孩子们通过表现自己对未来的表现来解决未来思维的行为任务。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2021 APA，保留所有权利）。