Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to anticipate the future improves markedly acrossthe preschool years. One major area of improvement is in chil-dren’s ability to consider their future preferences. Whereas5-year-olds understand they will prefer adult items in the fu-ture, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer childitems. In the present research, we show that preschoolers(N=120) show an ownership-advantage in their future-orientedthinking—they are better able to indicate which objects theywill own as adults than to indicate what they will like. Thesefindings are informative about the basis for children’s difficultyanticipating their future preferences, and also reveal differ-ences between how children think about ownership and prefer-ences.