Lagattuta, Kristin H. University of California Davis
We never know for certain what will happen in the future, so we often base our expectations for what we think might happen on what has occurred in the past. This ability to bridge the past to the future is a fundamental component of adult social cognition critical for assessing risk, making decisions, and understanding others. Very little is known, however, about how young children evaluate risk, what meaning they think past events forecast for the future, or about how they reason about future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions. The goal of this project is to investigate the development of this knowledge in children between the ages of 4 and 8 years and to compare their reasoning to that of adults. This research further investigates whether visual attention to and reasoning about connections between the past and the future predict children's worry and anxiety. Since these symptoms are more prevalent in females versus males, gender differences will also be assessed. Children and adults will be presented with scenarios involving characters that encounter a person or animal that they have had multiple experiences with in the past: current situations involving low risk (two positive past events), high risk (two negative past events), and ambiguous risk (a positive and a negative past event). Illustrations will be displayed on an eye-tracking monitor so that participants' visual attention (how long they attend to a particular source of information) can be quantified. Participants will make judgments about characters' thoughts about the likelihood of future events, emotions, and action decisions. Beliefs about the degree to which people generalize from past experiences to similar category members will also be examined. Worry and anxiety symptoms will be assessed via parent- and self-report. With these measures we will test hypotheses regarding 1) how predictions of the future based on past experience develop, 2) whether greater attention to negative/positive information leads to more/less anxiety, and 3) whether anxiety is more prevalent in females than males.
