These pretzels are going to make me thirsty tomorrow: Differential development of hot and cool episodic foresight in early childhood?

Abstract

The current study examined 3- and 7-year-olds' performance on two types of episodic foresight tasks: A task that required 'cool' reasoning processes about the use of objects in future situations and a task that required 'hot' processes to inhibit a salient current physiological state in order to reason accurately about a future state. Results revealed that 7-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds on the episodic foresight task that involved cool processes, but did not show age differences in performance on the task that involved hot processes. In fact, both 3- and 7-year-olds performed equally poorly on the task that required predicting a future physiological state that was in conflict with their current state. Further, performance on the two tasks was unrelated. We discuss the results in terms of differing developmental trajectories for episodic foresight tasks that differentially rely on hot and cool processes and the universal difficulties humans have with predicting later outcomes that conflict with current motivational states.