Cultures Crossing: The Power of Habit in Delaying Gratification.

Resisting immediate temptations in favor of larger later rewards predicts academic success, socioemotional competence, and health. These links with delaying gratification appear from early childhood and have been explained by cognitive and social factors that help override tendencies toward immediate gratification. However, some tendencies may actually promote delaying gratification. We assessed children's delaying gratification for different rewards across two cultures that differ in customs around waiting. Consistent with our preregistered prediction, results showed that children in Japan (n = 80) delayed gratification longer for food than for gifts, whereas children in the United States (n = 58) delayed longer for gifts than for food. This interaction may reflect cultural differences: Waiting to eat is emphasized more in Japan than in the United States, whereas waiting to open gifts is emphasized more in the United States than in Japan. These findings suggest that culturally specific habits support delaying gratification, providing a new way to understand why individuals delay gratification and why this behavior predicts life success.

The domain-specific and domain-general relationships of visuospatial working memory to reasoning ability.

The degree to which visuospatial working memory (VSWM) is separable from working memory in general is an open question. On one hand, the construct is often researched as a unitary, domain-specific system. On the other, there is evidence that VWSM shares a common processing component with verbal memory. One might interpret this shared component as domain-general attention. We used confirmatory factor analysis to demonstrate that VSWM shares a domain-general component with verbal memory tasks and has a domain-specific component that is independent of verbal memory. Furthermore, the domain-general component was found to correlate with reasoning ability in both the visuospatial and verbal domains. The domain-specific component only correlated with reasoning ability when the tests had a strong visuospatial component. We argue that theories of VSWM need to place greater emphasis on its multiply determined nature.