The Influence Of Future Oriented Decision-making On The Affective Decision-making In Preschool Children

Affective decision-making generally means the decision-making about events that have emotionally significant consequences (i.e., meaningful rewards and/or losses), and it requires the decision-maker resist the immediate temptation to obtain a greater benefit with an eye to the future. Children Gambling Task is the most popular measurement paradigm of affective decision-making in preschool children. According to the assumption of Garon & Moore, affective decision-making mainly includes three main components: future oriented decision-making, inhibition control and the inductive ability. Future oriented decision-making involves at least the mechanism to generate non-current scenarios involving self (imagination, temporally extended self), the mechanism to allow action in favour of the imagined future (as opposed to the perceived present), and the mechanism to select which possible future to work towards.This research analyze the three components in detail. From Gaoshan & Lihong's paper we can learn 3-year-olds' success in the task does not depend on the inductive ability involve working memory and calculation. Many studies have proven that 3-year-old children have good control and inhibit flexibility in the one-dimensional shift task. There might be some other critical factors that lead to 3-year-olds' difficulty on this task.3-year-old children are usually deeply attracted by the immediate temptation, and hardly forecast the future consequence of their actions. Future oriented decision-making possibly has the significant influence on the affective decision-making. In order to verify this assumption, We carried on three experiments.Experiment 1(within-subjects design) is designed to devided 90 3-year-old children to three groups randomly. One uses Kerr & Zelazo's cards, another uses Gaoshan's cards, the other not only uses Gaoshan's cards but also directly tell the subjects the rule of game. The require of the inductive ability becomes lower and lower in these three tasks. The result confirms again that the inductive ability is not the most critical aspect.Experiment 2(between-subjects design) tests 61 children (3.5-4.5 years) using the task of delay of gratification, the goal-reversed task and the children gambling task which is zero inductive. Results show us the former two tasks are independent each other, the goal-reversed task and gambling task are not significantly corrected, but the task of delay of gratification and gambling task are significantly corrected. This conclusion coincides with the assumption that future oriented decision-making has the significant influence on the affective decision-making.Experiment 3(within-subjects design) firstly choose the appropriate subject by the former two task of Experiment 2, finally we find 86 children who have the favorable ability of inhibition control, but not the ability of future oriented making. These subjects are randomly assigned to the comparison group and the experiment group. The second group need to first accept the training of the ability of future oriented decision-making, and one week later complete the zero inductive gambling task. Results show that training can enhance the children's affective decision making remarkably.