This is the research companion to The Futures They Can Imagine. Read the main post first.
Seventeen years old, the college essay open, the cursor blinking, and nothing arriving. The main post asks what experiences she has to draw on. These five sources connect possible selves, memory, and imagined futures. They support taking that question seriously, while leaving room between the research and our suggestions for family life.
Where Possible Selves Come From
Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954-969.
DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.41.9.954
What they found: This paper introduced possible selves, our ideas of who we might become, hope to become, or fear becoming. The authors describe how those images can guide present behavior. They also locate their origins in social experience, including the people, roles, and possibilities available around us.
Why this matters for you: A future your kid can picture gives them something to steer by. Meeting people with different paths can expand the futures they consider possible for themselves.
What it doesn’t answer: This is a foundational theoretical paper, with supporting research, rather than a test of a parenting practice. It does not show that a vivid future is enough to produce action, or that a child without one lacks motivation.
Imagining Draws on Remembering
Addis, D. R., Pan, L., Vu, M.-A., Laiser, N., & Schacter, D. L. (2009). Constructive episodic simulation of the future and the past: Distinct subsystems of a core brain network mediate imagining and remembering. Neuropsychologia, 47(11), 2222-2238.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.10.026
What they found: Researchers asked adults to remember past events and imagine new ones assembled from details of their own memories. The tasks engaged overlapping parts of a core brain network, with differences between remembering and constructing imagined scenes. The overlap supports the idea that memory supplies details for imagination.
Why this matters for you: This is the research behind the main post’s footage metaphor. A place visited, a person met, or a problem watched becomes something a child can draw on when picturing a future scene.
What it doesn’t answer: Adult brain imaging does not tell us how much childhood enrichment changes later ambitions. Offering varied experiences is our parenting inference from this account of imagination, not an intervention tested here.
When Children Begin to Picture Future Events
Atance, C. M., & O’Neill, D. K. (2005). The emergence of episodic future thinking in humans. Learning and Motivation, 36(2), 126-144.
DOI: 10.1016/j.lmot.2005.02.003
What they found: The authors distinguish episodic future thinking, imagining yourself in a particular future event, from knowing how events usually unfold. Using verbal and nonverbal tasks with young children, they place its emergence around ages three to four.
Why this matters for you: Preschoolers are beginning to do the kind of imagining invited by a question such as, ‘What will you do when we get there?’ Keeping the scene concrete gives them something to work with.
What it doesn’t answer: The paper does not test whether dinner-table questions improve this ability, or whether more varied experiences produce more ambitious future selves. The main post’s future-talk practice is a suggestion, not a validated training program.
The Vividness Intervention
van Gelder, J.-L., Luciano, E. C., Weulen Kranenbarg, M., & Hershfield, H. E. (2015). Friends with my future self: Longitudinal vividness intervention reduces delinquency. Criminology, 53(2), 158-179.
DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12064
What they found: In a study of 133 high-school students, the intervention group spent a week exchanging messages with an avatar representing their future self. They subsequently reported less delinquent behavior; the comparison group did not show that reduction. The intervention also made the future self more vivid.
Why this matters for you: Making a future self concrete showed promise as a way to influence present choices. It gives the main post a behavioral example to set beside the memory research.
What it doesn’t answer: This was an avatar-based intervention with high-school students and self-reported behavior. It does not isolate vividness as the sole cause, or establish that ordinary future-talk with younger children has the same effect.
The Adolescent Brain’s Meaning-Making
Gotlieb, R. J. M., Yang, X.-F., & Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2024). Diverse adolescents’ transcendent thinking predicts young adult psychosocial outcomes via brain network development. Scientific Reports, 14, 6254.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-56800-0
What they found: Adolescents who connected concrete stories to broader ideas and meanings showed changes over time in connectivity between two brain networks. Those changes predicted later identity development, which in turn predicted young-adult self-liking and relationship satisfaction.
Why this matters for you: Thinking beyond the immediate event was associated with later development. It gives us a reason to leave room for a teenager’s questions about what an experience means, as well as what happened.
What it doesn’t answer: This was a small longitudinal study, not an experiment assigning adolescents to different kinds of conversation. It cannot show that parent-led ‘bigger picture’ talk caused the brain changes or later outcomes.
Coming Up
Turns, not words. Next, what researchers have found about the back-and-forth in family talk, why a baby’s sounds count as an invitation to respond, and how to make room for the next turn.
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