Working with Dr. Tashauna Blankenship, my interests have evolved to encompass the field of episodic future thinking (EFT) in tandem with social cognition. In short, I am interested in the ability of children to imagine the future for themselves and someone else. Below are some of my current/past projects:
In this project, I ask what the commonalities and differences are between EFT for the self and another. Neurophysiological research has found overlapping networks for reasoning about the self and another (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; Hassabis & Maguire, 2007) and other researchers have found distinct pathways when thinking for another (van Veluw & Chance, 2013; Saxe et al., 2016). Cognitively, is there some underlying process that aids with both EFT for the self and another? This project investigates how personal and observational episodic memory aids EFT for oneself and another, involving both behavioral and EEG components. Data collection is ongoing, with the behavioral experiment almost complete and the EEG experiment in the beginning stages.
A popular means of studying EFT in young children is the “Spoon task,” first proposed by Tulving (2005). In Tulving’s story, a girl dreams that she is at a party where everyone is eating pudding except for her as she does not have a spoon. The night after, she puts a spoon under her pillow in anticipation of the same dream. Spoon tasks used by researchers of EFT generally include the introduction of a problem in one room, a delay in a different room, and the chance to choose an item to bring back to the first room that resolves the problem. Different versions of the Spoon task have been used extensively in the EFT literature (Dickerson et al., 2018; Suddendorf et al., 2011) with results commonly showing that children begin to succeed in the Spoon task from the age of 4 years old. However, some authors argue that the Spoon task depends on simple associations rather than true EFT (Atance et al., 2023; Dickerson et al., 2018). In our study, we designed a version of the Spoon task that is more spontaneous in nature using drawing rather than item selection. Data collection is ongoing. This study is a collaboration with Candice Koolhaas, also a PhD student at UMass Boston.
College-level math appears to engage certain types of EFT (Maciejewski et al., 2016). Common forms include imagining possible actions to be taken, imagining a future social situation, experiencing emotions, and anticipating failure. However, there is scant work on how EFT plays a role in math for younger children. Taking inspiration from Coughlin et al. (2022), our study uses the cogAT with pre- and post-tests and an EFT manipulation to examine how EFT can benefit math performance. The study is in piloting phase. This study is a collaboration with Jamie Donenfeld, also a PhD student at UMass Boston.
Adults understand that when an item is chosen consistently more than another item, that people prefer the former more. Smith-Flores et al. (2021) found that 4-10-year-old children can understand this phenomenon but don't always choose the more popular item for themselves. I ask whether this effect is already present in much younger children, 2-year-olds, in an eyetracking study. I am currently working on editing filmed videos for the study and plan to add it to Lookit/Children Helping Science.
Some works have shown a correlation between ToM and EFT (Atance & Jackson, 2009; Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007) and others don’t (Hanson et al., 2014). I was inspired by a study by Belanger et al. (2014) where children indicated what they would like when they are an adult, choosing between a child-item and an adult-item. I added a different block to the study where children reason about their preferences in the short-term. I have finished data collection and am working on the manuscript.
There are potential relationships between memory-guided planning, executive functions, and ToM (Atance & Jackson, 2009; Hanson et al., 2014). My advisor, Dr. Tashauna Blankenship, and Dr. Alleyne Broomell of Western Carolina University devised a joint memory-guided planning and ToM task, the first to utilize both aspects. Children play a game where they get to make plans for two different characters, one with the same preference as them (congruent) and one with a different preference (incongruent). I added three additional tasks of executive function, ToM, and EFT to explore correlations between the tasks. The project is nearing the end of data collection.
I am currently working on a framework for planning tasks with another graduate student, Jade Zack, and am preparing a review on infantile amnesia on my own alongside Dr. Blankenship. I am supervising two RAs' projects, one a spin-off of my project Glow Box and another investigating memory for the order of events in young children. I am also collaborating with a fellow PhD student, Candice Koolhaas, on a potential review of symbolic and subsymbolic systems in the brain. Outside of research, I am instructor of record for Introduction to Cognitive Science. Finally, I continue to be involved with ManyBabies as the co-head of the Teaching, Training, and Open Science committee.