Do preschoolers save to benefit their future selves?

Using a new paradigm for measuring children’s saving behaviors involving two marble games differing in desirability, we assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds saved marbles for future use, saved increasingly on a second trial, saved increasingly with age, and were sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. We also assessed whether performance on the saving paradigm was related to theory of mind performance. Children saved significantly more marbles on the second trial than the first and saved significantly more when a future reward was more desirable than a present reward (rather than the reverse). However, older children did not save significantly more than younger children. Performance on one of two false belief tasks was not correlated with saving behavior and performance on the other was only marginally correlated with the number of marbles saved on trial 2. Implications for children’s future thinking and comparative research are discussed. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. There has been a surge of research in the last five years on humans’ capacity to think about the future. Most of this research has focused on the adult population and on the similarities between thinking about the future and thinking about the past (Addis, Wong, & Schacter, 2007; Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007; Szpunar & McDermott, 2008). Although developmentalists have begun to study future thinking, one future-oriented process that remains relatively unexplored is children’s saving behavior, which we examine in the study reported here. Studying children’s saving behaviors is important for several reasons. First, an individual who has no concept of the future would not engage in flexible saving strategies. By “flexible,” we mean in a novel context and in a domain that is not linked with survival (e.g., future enjoyment of a non-essential resource). Second, saving is a highly adaptive aspect of humans’ future-oriented behavior. Humans ∗ Corresponding author at: School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Vanier Hall, 136 Jean Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, Ontario