Young Children Have Difficulty Predicting Future Preferences in the Presence of a Conflicting Physiological State<\/a><\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\nMahy\u2019s work built upon on an earlier study in which researchers asked children if they would want to eat pretzels or drink water at that moment.<\/p>\n
Mahy also asked the children in her study the same question. Regardless of how they answered, she gave the children the chance to eat as many pretzels as they wished, read them a story for five minutes and asked them the question: \u201cI want you to imagine that you\u2019re coming back tomorrow. What will you want tomorrow, pretzels or water?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019d expect, based on children\u2019s original baseline preference for pretzels, that they should be able to think ahead and say, \u2018Well, even though I might be thirsty right now, tomorrow I\u2019ll probably want pretzels again\u2019,\u201d explains Mahy.<\/p>\n
But the children overwhelmingly chose water over pretzels as what they identified as what they would want the following day.<\/p>\n
Mahy replicated the experiment in a group of three to seven-year-olds at Brock University and found that, like the earlier study, most children who chose pretzels over water initially indicated that they would want water the following day.<\/p>\n
But, \u201cthere\u2019s a possibility that the children were just bored with the pretzels so it wouldn\u2019t matter what you\u2019d give them: pretzels and chocolate or pretzels and broccoli,\u201d says Mahy. \u201cThey may be thinking, \u2018I just ate a bunch of pretzels, I\u2019m sick of them\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
So to rule out that possibility, Mahy added something new in her research: she asked the children to explain their choice of water over pretzels.<\/p>\n
Mahy created four categories of possible answers: \u201ccurrent state,\u201d where children could explain that they would want water tomorrow because they are thirsty now; \u201cfuture state,\u201d where children say that they would want water tomorrow because they might be thirsty; \u201cgeneral preference,\u201d where children would that water is healthy or good for you; and an \u201cother\u201d category of unusual or miscellaneous responses.<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s answers fell in the four categories with equal regularity, says Mahy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem to be that children are aware that, \u2018I\u2019m thirsty, that\u2019s why I want water tomorrow\u2019,\u201d she says. \u201cTheir current state (of being thirsty) is so salient and obvious to them that they\u2019re thinking, this is how I\u2019m going to feel tomorrow and the next day and unable to separate how they\u2019re currently feeling and inhibit that.\u201d<\/p>\n
To further prove the point, Mahy then gave the children some water to drink and asked them again if they would want pretzels or water the following day.<\/p>\n
Most of them switched their preference from water back to pretzels.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter their thirst was quenched, they were much more able to say, \u2018Oh, I want pretzels because I love pretzels; they are good, they are tasty\u2019,\u201d says Mahy.<\/p>\n
There was another interesting twist to the research results.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou might expect that kids, by the time they are six or seven, are getting better at this than a three-year-old; you could not imagine a three-year-old saying, \u2018I\u2019m thirsty now so I\u2019ll always be thirsty in the future\u2019,\u201d says Mahy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no difference between three- and seven-year-olds\u201d in terms of whether they chose pretzels or water for the future or how they explained their future preference for water over pretzels, she says.<\/p>\n
Mahy explains that adults even have a tough time with this.<\/p>\n
\u201cI often have this problem,\u201d she notes. \u201cI\u2019ll eat breakfast and I\u2019ll leave the house to run errands and think, \u2018Oh I\u2019m full right now, so I\u2019ll be fine.\u2019 And then it gets to be lunchtime and \u2018I\u2019m starving, and wondering what was I thinking\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Children are unable to recognize that their immediate hunger and thirst affects their choice of what they would want to eat or drink in the future, a Brock University study has found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":36868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,5],"tags":[3626,3187,9749,894],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36870,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36867\/revisions\/36870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}