An original study (Mischel et al., 1988) gave young children a marshmallow and told the children that if they could wait 10 minutes, they’d get an additional marshmallow. They recorded whether or not the child was able to wait the 10 minutes. The ability to delay reinforcement was profound - every moment longer that a child had been able to wait was associated with several markers for success in life 10 years later. The scale of measurement for amount of time (in seconds) that elapsed before the child ate the marshmallow is: