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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明天会有所不同：孩子们在思考未来时能够融入干预事件。

面向未来的思想在人类中无处不在，但在儿童中学习却具有挑战性。成年人不仅会思考未来，还可以代表与现在不同的未来世界状态。然而，评估未来思维发展的行为任务传统上并不要求儿童这样做，因为大多数可以仅基于当前的表示来解决。为了克服这个限制，我们修改了一个现有的任务，使孩子们不能简单地依靠对现在的表示来取得成功（即，“现在”的正确答案与“明天”的正确答案不同）。来自加拿大渥太华及周边地区的 117 名 4 至 7 岁儿童（64 名女孩和 53 名男孩）的样本，他们主要是欧洲加拿大人（占样本的 78.6%），家庭收入超过 100 美元，000 CAN（占样本的 66.1%）参与。孩子们记住了解决我们的任务所需的信息，并且在表现方面存在与年龄相关的变化，但只有 7 岁的孩子做出适应性未来导向的决定的频率明显高于偶然性。移除了任务修改（所以现在和未来的正确答案是一样的），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，儿童通过对未来的表征采取行动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 岁的孩子做出适应未来的决定的频率明显高于机会。移除了任务修改（所以现在和未来的正确答案是一样的），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，儿童通过对未来的表征采取行动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 岁的孩子做出适应未来的决定的频率明显高于机会。移除了任务修改（所以现在和未来的正确答案是一样的），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，儿童通过对未来的表征采取行动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）。