Description

As adults we take control of our live and often act in anticipation of upcoming problems or opportunities. For example, we practice our musical skills to succeed in a competition or look for new job opportunities long before the current position ends. In contrast, children usually tend to live in the here and now. We still know little about what helps them to become more proactive and to take control of their own future (Pauen et al. 2016; Munakata et al. 2012)? The present project aims to gain novel insights into this question. Two points seem to be interesting in this respect.

First, acting in advance requires to imagine how a specific event unfolds and what consequences it may have (episodic foresight; e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007, Suddendorf et al., 2011). Drawing on adult research, the present project examines two ways in which episodic foresight may foster self-initiated proactivity in children: (a) Children may be more motivated to prepare if they anticipate possible affective consequences of the event that are more or less desirable. (b) Thinking of the spatial-temporal features of the event may help children to become aware of an upcoming problem and the possible means to solve it.

Second, simple forms of episodic foresight are already in place in preschool-age (Hudson et al., 2011), but children still seem to struggle to vividly pre-feel the hedonic consequences of an event and to imagine the spatial-temporal context in sufficient detail (Gott & Lah, 2014; Redshaw & Suddendorf, 2013). This may be one reason why they rarely act in advance on their own in everyday life. Enactment may help them to overcome these shortcomings. Different lines of research support this idea. For example, bodily expressing emotional states has been shown to affect the way that one thinks about emotional states (Niedenthal, 2007) and so embodying anticipated emotions may help to pre-feel and to think about emotional consequences of a future event (Gilbert & Wilson, 2007). Further, taking the perspective of somebody else has been shown to benefit from role play in adults and pretend play in children (Furumi & Koyasu, 2014; Gillepsie, 2012; Lillard et al., 2013) and may thus also facilitate to take the perspective of the future self. In addition, acting during thinking elicits representational change (Boncoddo, Dixon & Kelley, 2010), fosters an episodic-like structure of narratives (Koc & Ilgaz, 2005; Hostetter & Alibali, 2019) and thus may also enhance a detailed, episodic imagination of the future that goes beyond the immediate present.

Bringing together those diverse research fields, the present project aims to investigate whether and how (enacted) episodic foresight helps preschool-aged children to behave proactively. In general, this project has the potential to improve our understanding of how enactment fosters autonomous and adaptive behavior in children by supporting developing complex cognition.