The Development Of Preschoolers' Mental Time Travel And Its Relationship To Theory Of Mind

Mental time travel refers to the faculty that allows humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to re-live, or forwards to pre-live events. Mentally reliving past events is also known as episodic memory (i.e., mental time travel into the past); By contrast, mental construction of potential future episodes has only very recently begun to draw attention, which is referred to episodic future thinking (i.e. mental time travel into the future). There is growing interest in mental time travel in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, comparative psychology, and developmental psychology. Current developmental studies on mental time travel suggested that the key developments of mental time travel occur between the ages of 3 to 5. After a brief introduction of the notion of mental time travel, this paper systematically reviewed some existing studies in developmental field related to this topic. In the end, the issue of this paper was pointed out. This research on children aged 3-5, adopting different methods, explored preschoolers'mental time travel into the past and future and its relationship to theory of mind.In Study 1, we conducted 2 tasks-episodic memory task of recalling cards and trip task that examined preschoolers'episodic memory, episodic future thinking, and the relationship between them.In Study 2, Participants listened to stories featuring characters that experienced negative events, and then, many days later, felt worried or changed their behaviors upon seeing the same entity. This research investigated the preschoolers'explanations about emotions and behaviors caused by thinking about future because of the past, in order to address the development of mental time travel.In Study 3, the relations between mental time travel (i.e., episodic memory and episodic future thinking) and theory of mind were investigated.The main findings in the above studies are as follows: (1) 3-year-olds only show the rudiments of mental time travel (i.e., episodic memory and episodic future thinking). 4-year-olds'mental time travel is at a level intermediate between the 3-year-olds and the 5-year-olds. 5-year-olds'mental time travel is significantly higher than that of 3-year-olds.(2) There are no gender differences of children's mental time travel.(3) There is significantly positive correlation between performances on children's episodic memory task and the episodic future thinking task.(4) Whether children provide PTF explanations (past-to-future explanations) for the story Vignettes was used to measure children's mental time travel. The age difference is significant for the number of participants who provided one or more PTF explanations. 5-year-olds who provided one or more PTF explanations are more than 3-year-olds. The age difference is significant for the frequency of PTF explanations across story trails. Although all age groups offered PTF explanations for the story trails (Ms>33.8% of trials), 3-year-olds provided such explanations significantly less often than 4 and 5-year-olds. 4-year-olds provided such explanations significantly less often than 5-year-olds.(5) 3-year-olds provided significantly fewer past event explanations than 4 and 5-year-olds. By contrast, 3-year-olds provided significantly more present event explanations than 5-year-olds.(6) Children with high TOM-competence had a better performance on episodic memory task than those with middle and low TOM-competence, while the latter two groups had no difference. Children with high and middle TOM-competence had a better performance on episodic future thinking task than those with low TOM-competence, while the former two groups had no difference. Controlling for age, children's scores of episodic memory were not significantly related to their scores of TOM. However, their scores of episodic future thinking were significantly related to their scores of TOM.