Development of Episodic Future Thinking and Future-oriented Decision Making Study, 2016-2019

These data stem from five large studies examining the relation between episodic future thinking and delay of gratification in preschoolers, children, and adolescents. Study 1 examined the relation between episodic future thinking and performance on a delay choice task in preschoolers; Study 2 examined whether performance in preschoolers on delay choice was enhanced by encouraging participants to thinking episodically about the future. The results of Studies 1 and 2 indicate that while there may be some relations between delay choice and episodic future thinking in this age group, children this age do not benefit from being primed to think episodically. Studies 3 and 4 examined similar issues in older children. The findings of Study 3 indicated that episodic future thinking is not related to delay choice in this age group, but that a measure of subjective future time was predictive, suggesting that how children represent the distance in time of future events has an impact on whether they decide to delay gratification. Study 4 found that older children, like preschoolers, do not benefit from being primed to think episodically about the future. Study 5 examined such priming in adolescents and adults, and included a novel priming condition in which participants thought about future episodes concerning another person. The findings demonstrated the standard episodic future priming effect in both adolescents and adults but there was no benefit in the novel priming condition. These results suggest that episodic future priming is not beneficial to delay of gratification until the adolescent years, and that such priming must specifically involve thought about the future self.