Do attachment and mind-reading help kids wait for bigger rewards?
Among 6- to 10-year-olds, children who better understood others' false beliefs, and those with more secure family attachment, were more willing to wait for a bigger reward.
Source
Is a bird in the hand worth two in the future? Intertemporal choice, attachment and theory of mind in school-aged children
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Children aged 6, 8 and 10 from one Italian school completed a new candy-based intertemporal choice task, false-belief and mental-verb tasks, and a picture-based attachment measure in one individual session.
- N
- N=91 · 91 children: 30 six-year-olds, 29 eight-year-olds and 32 ten-year-olds.
- Population
- Middle-socioeconomic-status children attending a public primary school in Northern Italy, with no reported learning or social difficulties.
- Outcome
- Two intertemporal choice scores: waiting tolerance (how many days they would wait for two candies instead of one) and sensitivity to reward size (how many candies they needed to wait a week).
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers devised a two-part candy task: in one part children chose between one candy now or two candies after a delay that shrank from 7 days down, and in the other they chose between one candy now or a growing number of candies after one week. Children also completed first- and second-order false-belief stories, a test of mental-state verbs, a vocabulary test, and the Separation Anxiety Test, a picture-based measure of attachment to family and to school caregivers. Correlations and hierarchical regressions tested whether age, attachment and theory of mind predicted the two choice scores.
What they found
The two choice scores were strongly related (r = 0.753), and 10-year-olds were more willing to wait than 6-year-olds. For waiting tolerance, family attachment and first-order false-belief understanding were significant predictors, and once theory of mind was added age no longer contributed. For sensitivity to reward size, only first-order false-belief understanding remained a significant predictor; attachment did not predict it, and attachment to the school caregiver and second-order false belief were not useful predictors.
The limits
What it doesn't show
All measures were taken at one time point in one school, so the study shows associations, not that secure attachment or theory of mind cause better self-control, and it cannot track development within children. The candy task records a stated choice about waiting days rather than observing children actually resisting temptation, and it was newly devised for this study with no established reliability or validity. Attachment was inferred from children's stories about pictured separations rather than observed behaviour, and the authors note they measured only cognitive theory of mind and no other family factors such as parenting style.
Key terms
- Intertemporal choice
- A decision between a smaller reward available sooner and a larger reward available later.
- Delay of gratification
- Giving up an immediate reward in order to obtain a better one later, often used as a measure of self-control in children.
- False-belief task
- A test of theory of mind in which a child must predict what someone will do based on a belief the child knows to be wrong.
- Second-order false belief
- Understanding what one person thinks about another person's belief, such as 'she thinks that he thinks...'.
- Attachment style
- The pattern of emotional bond a child has with caregivers, ranging from secure to insecure, thought to shape self-regulation.
- Hierarchical regression
- A regression in which predictors are added in steps to see how much extra variance each new set explains.
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Quiz yourself
What did procedure B of the intertemporal choice task vary?
Common questions
Why would understanding false beliefs help a child wait?
The authors suggest that the ability to represent a mental state different from the present one may help children imagine and hold in mind a future benefit, making the delayed option feel more real.
Does attachment matter for all parts of waiting?
In this study family attachment predicted how long children would wait for a fixed reward, but not how many extra candies they needed to accept a one-week wait, which the authors link to trust and self-control.
Why did the age effect disappear?
Older children also had better false-belief understanding; once that was included in the model, age added nothing extra, suggesting the age improvement may run through developing theory of mind.
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