Creativity and flexibility in young children's use of external cognitive strategies.

A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external metacognitive strategy and transfer it across contexts. Children watched as an experimenter demonstrated how to mark the location of a hidden prize, thus helping them successfully retrieve that prize in the future. Children were then given the opportunity to spontaneously adopt an external marking strategy across six test trials. Children who did so at least once were then introduced to a conceptually similar but structurally distinct transfer task. Although most 3-year-olds deployed the demonstrated strategy in the initial test phase, none of them modified that strategy to solve the transfer task. By contrast, many children aged 4 years and older spontaneously devised more than one previously unseen reminder-setting strategy across the six transfer trials, with this tendency increasing with age. From age 6, children deployed effective external strategies on most trials, with the number, combination, and order of unique strategies used varying widely both within and across the older age groups. These results demonstrate young children's remarkable flexibility in the transferral of external strategies across contexts and point to pronounced individual differences in the strategies children devise. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social value at a distance: Higher identification with all of humanity is associated with reduced social discounting.

How much we value the welfare of others has critical implications for the collective good. Yet, it is unclear what leads people to make more or less equal decisions about the welfare of those from whom they are socially distant. The current research sought to explore the psychological mechanisms that might underlie welfare judgements across social distance. Here, a social discounting paradigm was used to measure the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the social distance of its recipient increased. Across two cohorts (one discovery, one replication), we found that a more expansive identity with all of humanity was associated with reduced social discounting. Additionally, we investigated the specificity of this association by examining whether this relationship extended to delay discounting, the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the temporal distance to its receipt increases. Our findings suggest that the observed association with identity was unique to social discounting, thus underscoring a distinction in value-based decision-making processes across distances in time and across social networks. As data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also considered how stress associated with this global threat might influence welfare judgements across social distances. We found that, even after controlling for COVID-19 related stress, correlations between identity and social discounting held. Together, these findings elucidate the psychological processes that are associated with a more equal distribution of generosity.

Metacognitive deficits are associated with lower sensitivity to preference reversals in nicotine dependence.

Deficits in impulse control belong to the core profile of nicotine dependence. Smokers might thus benefit from voluntarily self-restricting their access to the immediate temptation of nicotine products (precommitment) in order to avoid impulse control failures. However, little is known about how smokers' willingness to engage in voluntary self-restrictions is determined by metacognitive insight into their general preferences for immediate over delayed rewards. Here, with a series of monetary intertemporal choice tasks, we provide empirical evidence for reduced metacognitive accuracy in smokers relative to non-smokers and show that smokers overestimate the subjective value of delayed rewards relative to their revealed preferences. In line with the metacognitive deficits, smokers were also less sensitive to the risk of preference reversals when deciding whether or not to restrict their access to short-term financial rewards. Taken together, the current findings suggest that deficits not only in impulse control but also in metacognition may hamper smokers' resistance to immediate rewards and capacity to pursue long-term goals.

Intertemporal choice reflects value comparison rather than self-control: insights from confidence judgements.

Intertemporal decision-making has long been assumed to measure self-control, with prominent theories treating choices of smaller, sooner rewards as failed attempts to override immediate temptation. If this view is correct, people should be more confident in their intertemporal decisions when they 'successfully' delay gratification than when they do not. In two pre-registered experiments with built-in replication, adult participants (n = 117) made monetary intertemporal choices and rated their confidence in having made the right decisions. Contrary to assumptions of the self-control account, confidence was not higher when participants chose delayed rewards. Rather, participants were more confident in their decisions when possible rewards were further apart in time-discounted subjective value, closer to the present, and larger in magnitude. Demonstrating metacognitive insight, participants were more confident in decisions that better aligned with their separate valuation of possible rewards. Decisions made with less confidence were more prone to changes-of-mind and more susceptible to a patience-enhancing manipulation. Together, our results establish that confidence in intertemporal choice tracks uncertainty in estimating and comparing the value of possible rewards-just as it does in decisions unrelated to self-control. Our findings challenge self-control views and instead cast intertemporal choice as a form of value-based decision-making about future possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Subjective Time in Dementia: A Critical Review.

The capacity for subjective time in humans encompasses the perception of time's unfolding from moment to moment, as well as the ability to traverse larger temporal expanses of past- and future-oriented thought via mental time travel. Disruption in time perception can result in maladaptive outcomes-from the innocuous lapse in timing that leads to a burnt piece of toast, to the grievous miscalculation that produces a traffic accident-while disruption to mental time travel can impact core functions from planning appointments to making long-term decisions. Mounting evidence suggests that disturbances to both time perception and mental time travel are prominent in dementia syndromes. Given that such disruptions can have severe consequences for independent functioning in everyday life, here we aim to provide a comprehensive exposition of subjective timing dysfunction in dementia, with a view to informing the management of such disturbances. We consider the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning changes to both time perception and mental time travel across different dementia disorders. Moreover, we explicate the functional implications of altered subjective timing by reference to two key and representative adaptive capacities: prospective memory and intertemporal decision-making. Overall, our review sheds light on the transdiagnostic implications of subjective timing disturbances in dementia and highlights the high variability in performance across clinical syndromes and functional domains.

Increasing resolution in the mechanisms of resolve.

Ainslie offers an encompassing and compelling account of willpower, although his big-picture view comes occasionally at the cost of low resolution. We comment on ambiguity in the metacognitive and prospective mechanisms of resolve implicated in recursive self-prediction. We hope to show both the necessity and promise of specifying testable cognitive mechanisms of willpower.

Children Devise and Selectively Use Tools to Offload Cognition.

From maps sketched in sand to supercomputing software, humans ubiquitously enhance cognitive performance by creating and using artifacts that bear mental load [1-5]. This extension of information processing into the environment has taken center stage in debates about the nature of cognition in humans and other animals [6-9]. How does the human mind acquire such strategies? In two experiments, we investigated the developmental origins of cognitive offloading in 150 children aged between 4 and 11 years. We created a memory task in which children were required to recall the location of hidden targets. In one experiment, participants were provided with a pre-specified cognitive offloading opportunity: an option to mark the target locations with tokens during the hiding period. Even 4-year-old children quickly adopted this external strategy and, in line with a metacognitive account, children across ages offloaded more often when the task was more difficult. In a second experiment, we provided children with the means to devise their own cognitive offloading strategy. Very few younger children spontaneously devised a solution, but by ages 10 and 11, nearly all did so. In a follow-up test phase, a simple prompt greatly increased the rate at which the younger children devised an offloading strategy. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the difficulties of thinking arises early in development and improves throughout the early school years, with children learning to modify the world around them to compensate for their cognitive limits.

Developmental origins of cognitive offloading.

Many animals manipulate their environments in ways that appear to augment cognitive processing. Adult humans show remarkable flexibility in this domain, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand. We use calendars, calculators, navigational aids and other external means to compensate for our natural cognitive shortcomings and achieve otherwise unattainable feats of intelligence. As yet, however, the developmental origins of this fundamental capacity for cognitive offloading remain largely unknown. In two studies, children aged 4-11 years (n = 258) were given an opportunity to manually rotate a turntable to eliminate the internal demands of mental rotation--to solve the problem in the world rather than in their heads. In study 1, even the youngest children showed a linear relationship between mental rotation demand and likelihood of using the external strategy, paralleling the classic relationship between angle of mental rotation and reaction time. In study 2, children were introduced to a version of the task where manually rotating inverted stimuli was sometimes beneficial to performance and other times redundant. With increasing age, children were significantly more likely to manually rotate the turntable only when it would benefit them. These results show how humans gradually calibrate their cognitive offloading strategies throughout childhood and thereby uncover the developmental origins of this central facet of intelligence.

Deliberating trade-offs with the future.

Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into how people make intertemporal decisions, given that such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life and central in domains from substance use to climate change action. While it is clear that people make decisions according to rules, intuitions and habits, they also commonly deliberate over their options, thinking through potential outcomes and reflecting on their own preferences. In this Perspective, we bring to bear recent research into the higher-order capacities that underpin deliberation-particularly those that enable people to think about the future (prospection) and their own thinking (metacognition)-to shed light on intertemporal decision-making. We show how a greater appreciation for these mechanisms of deliberation promises to advance our understanding of intertemporal decision-making and unify a wide range of otherwise disparate choice phenomena.

It's in the bag: mobile containers in human evolution and child development.

Mobile containers are a keystone human innovation. Ethnographic data indicate that all human groups use containers such as bags, quivers and baskets, ensuring that individuals have important resources at the ready and are prepared for opportunities and threats before they materialize. Although there is speculation surrounding the invention of carrying devices, the current hard archaeological evidence only reaches back some 100,000 years. The dearth of ancient evidence may reflect not only taphonomic processes, but also a lack of attention to these devices. To begin investigating the origins of carrying devices we focus on exploring the basic cognitive processes involved in mobile container use and report an initial study on young children's understanding and deployment of such devices. We gave 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 106) the opportunity to spontaneously identify and use a basket to increase their own carrying capacity and thereby obtain more resources in the future. Performance improved linearly with age, as did the likelihood of recognizing that adults use mobile carrying devices to increase carrying capacity. We argue that the evolutionary and developmental origins of mobile containers reflect foundational cognitive processes that enable humans to think about their own limits and compensate for them.

Thinking about thinking about time.

Hoerl & McCormack (H&M) discuss the possible function of meta-representations in temporal cognition but ultimately take an agnostic stance. Here we outline the fundamental role that we believe meta-representations play. Because humans know that their representations of future events are just representations, they are in a position to compensate for the shortcomings of their own foresight and to prepare for multiple contingencies.

Cuing both positive and negative episodic foresight reduces delay discounting but does not affect risk-taking.

Humans frequently create mental models of the future, allowing outcomes to be inferred in advance of their occurrence. Recent evidence suggests that imagining positive future events reduces delay discounting (the devaluation of reward with time until its receipt), while imagining negative future events may increase it. Here, using a sample of 297 participants, we experimentally assess the effects of cued episodic simulation of positive and negative future scenarios on decision-making in the context of both delay discounting (monetary choice questionnaire) and risk-taking (balloon-analogue risk task). Participants discounted the future less when cued to imagine positive and negative future scenarios than they did when cued to engage in control neutral imagery. There were no effects of experimental condition on risk-taking. Thus, although these results replicate previous findings suggesting episodic future simulation can reduce delay discounting, they indicate that this effect is not dependent on the valence of the thoughts, and does not generalise to all other forms of "impulsive" decision-making. We discuss various interpretations of these results, and suggest avenues for further research on the role of prospection in decision-making.

The Functions of Prospection - Variations in Health and Disease.

Much of human life revolves around anticipating and planning for the future. It has become increasingly clear that this capacity for prospective cognition is a core adaptive function of the mind. Here, we review the role of prospection in two key functional domains: goal-directed behavior and flexible decision-making. We then survey and categorize variations in prospection, with a particular focus on functional impact in clinical psychological conditions and neurological disorders. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research into the functions of prospection and the manner in which these functions can shift toward maladaptive outcomes. In doing so, we consider the conceptualization and measurement of prospection, as well as novel approaches to its augmentation in healthy people and managing its alterations in a clinical context.

Development of Children's Use of External Reminders for Hard-to-Remember Intentions.

This study explored under what conditions young children would set reminders to aid their memory for delayed intentions. A computerized task requiring participants to carry out delayed intentions under varying levels of cognitive load was presented to 63 children (aged between 6.9 and 13.0 years old). Children of all ages demonstrated metacognitive predictions of their performance that were congruent with task difficulty. Only older children, however, set more reminders when they expected their future memory performance to be poorer. These results suggest that most primary school-aged children possess metacognitive knowledge about their prospective memory limits, but that only older children may be able to exercise the metacognitive control required to translate this knowledge into strategic reminder setting.

The association of Social Anxiety Disorder, Alcohol Use Disorder and reproduction: Results from four nationally representative samples of adults in the USA.

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) are highly prevalent and frequently co-occur. The results of population studies suggest that SAD tends to precede AUD, and the results of laboratory studies suggest that alcohol use facilitates social behaviors in socially anxious individuals. Therefore, we posited that, in a modern context, a tendency to consume alcohol may be positively selected for among socially anxious individuals by its effect on the likelihood of finding a partner and reproducing. We tested the hypothesis that a higher proportion of individuals with a lifetime diagnosis of SAD and AUD reproduce (i.e., have at least one child) relative to individuals with SAD absent AUD in an individual participant meta-analysis based on over 65,000 adults derived from four nationally representative cross-sectional samples. We then cross-validated these findings against the results of a 10-year follow up of one of these surveys. Lifetime history of SAD was not associated with reproduction whereas lifetime history of AUD was positively associated with reproduction. There was no statistically detectable difference in the proportion of individuals with a lifetime history of SAD with or without AUD who reproduced. There was considerable heterogeneity in all of the analyses involving SAD, suggesting that there are likely to be other pertinent variables relating to SAD and reproduction that should be delineated.

Affective forecasting bias in preschool children.

Adults are capable of predicting their emotional reactions to possible future events. Nevertheless, they systematically overestimate the intensity of their future emotional reactions relative to how they feel when these events actually occur. The developmental origin of this "intensity bias" has not yet been examined. Two studies were conducted to test the intensity bias in preschool children. In the first study, 5-year-olds (N=30) predicted how they would feel if they won or lost various games. Comparisons with subsequent self-reported feelings indicated that participants overestimated how sad they would feel to lose the games but did not overestimate their happiness from winning. The second study replicated this effect in another sample of 5-year-olds (n=34) and also found evidence of an intensity bias in 4-year-olds (n=30). These findings provide the first evidence of a negative intensity bias in affective forecasting among young children.

Thinking about threats: Memory and prospection in human threat management.

Humans have evolved mechanisms for the detection and management of possible threats in order to abate their negative consequences for fitness. Internally generated ('detached') cognition may have evolved in part because of its contributions to this broad function, but important questions remain about its role in threat management. In this article, we therefore present a taxonomy of threat-related internally generated cognition comprising episodic and semantic formats of memory and prospection. We address the proximate mechanisms of each of the capacities in this taxonomy, and discuss their respective contributions to adaptive threat management in humans. For instance, mental time travel empowers people to contemplate and learn from threats experienced long ago, as well as to plan for dangers that might arise in the distant future. However, despite their functional benefits, these thought processes are also central to contemporary anxiety disorders and may be a potent source of distress.

Using foresight to prioritise the present.

Planning for the future may encourage apparently "impulsive" behaviour when the future is anticipated to be bleak. Thus, a seeming failure of self-control in reactive violence could be caused not by a disinclination to plan ahead, but by virtue of this ability. Furthermore, we point to empirical and theoretical shortcomings in the authors' case, such as a failure to distinguish proximate and ultimate explanations.