The ability to perform an intended behavior in some future circumstance, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability for young children to develop. In this study, we examined PM in preschool children, with the addition of an output monitoring component, which is the ability to remember whether a previously intended action was completed. Participants were engaged in an ongoing task of sorting cards with a variety of images such as animals, tools, and foods by the size of pictures on the card. They were also instructed to sort any cards with animals into cardboard boxes marked as zoos. The first time any given animal was seen, it was to be placed in “Zoo 1,” and if the same animal was noticed again, it was to be placed in “Zoo 2.” Participants completed the task 3 times (each with different targets) on 3 separate days. Participants’ PM accuracy improved with practice. There was a relationship between age and PM performance on the first trial, with older children detecting more PM targets. This relationship was not present on the second and third trials, and a significant relationship between ongoing task errors and PM performance emerged, such that making fewer errors on the sorting task was associated with better PM performance. Regarding output monitoring errors, children most frequently placed both occurrences of the same PM target in the first zoo.

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Abstract. We assessed the ability of preschool children to assign the most difficult tasks to a symbolic helper. First, children were taught that a toy “helper” could aid them in remembering the location of a hidden item. Children preferentially assigned the helper to the objectively most difficult locations to remember. Each child then completed eight more tests, assessing a range of different skills such as counting, object identification, and word reading. Children again could assign some stimuli in each task to the helper, leaving the remaining stimuli for themselves to respond to in the given tasks. They were not explicitly told to assign the hardest stimulus to the helper. However, children consistently still did so in most tasks, although some tasks showed an effect of age where older children were more proficient in assigning the objectively more difficult stimuli to the helper. These results highlight a potential form of metacognition in young children in which they can monitor difficulty across varied kinds of assessments and use a generalized tool for asking for help that does not require verbal responding.