Connecting the Dots Between Past and Future: Constraints in Episodic Future Thinking in Early Childhood

Abstract

Preschoolers have limited capacity to use past experiences to prepare for the future. Two experiments sought to further understand these limitations. Experiment 1 (N = 42) showed that 3‐ to 4‐year olds’ difficulty performing anticipated future actions was constrained by their memory for relevant past actions, especially those including temporal information. Experiment 2 (N = 94) sought to determine whether preschoolers fail to see that past experiences can inform future‐oriented actions. When the connection between the past and future was experimentally heightened, future thinking accuracy improved, but only if preschoolers remembered past experiences. The results indicate that past recall is a prerequisite for future thinking but failure to bridge past and future further accounts for observed limitations in future thinking in early childhood.

“Plan chunking” expands 3-year-olds’ ability to complete multiple-step plans

“…Previous work suggested that children younger than 4 years struggle with multi-step memory-guided planning. Although they can retrieve the relevant knowledge they need to complete a sequence of steps from memory, they have difficulty planning and executing those steps (see, e.g., Blankenship & Kibbe, 2019Prabhakar & Hudson, 2014), which has led to the suggestion that memory-guided planning competence develops between the ages of 3 and 4 (see, e.g., Atance & O'Neill, 2005;Blankenship & Kibbe, 2019;Prabhakar & Ghetti, 2020;Russell et al, 2010). We found that, when the necessary steps of a multi-step plan were presented in a way that encouraged chunking, 3-year-olds were able to complete four-step plans at above-chance levels.…”

“…While the cognitive systems required for memory-guided planning emerge early in life, including explicit memory (Bauer, 1996;Hayne & Herbert, 2004;Rovee-Collier et al, 1980;Richmond & Nelson, 2009), episodic memory (Hayne & Imuta, 2011;Scarf et al, 2011Scarf et al, , 2013Drummey & Newcombe, 2002;Hayne & Imuta, 2011;King & Markant, 2022), and executive control (Rajan et al, 2014;Rajan & Bell, 2015;Espy, 1997;Willoughby et al, 2012), young children often struggle to carry out plans that require drawing on relevant memories to complete multiple steps (Atance & Jackson, 2009;Prabhakar & Ghetti, 2020;Prabhakar & Hudson, 2014;Suddendorf et al, 2011). Blankenship and Kibbe (2019) found that the primary limiting factor on young children's memory-guided planning abilities was the ability to execute a multiple-step plan in the correct sequence.…”

Updating and reasoning: Different processes, different models, different functions

“…1) to which they refer presents a broad challenge to the dual-systems framework. Children may struggle to retrieve temporal sequences, not because they revert to updating, but rather because of episodic memory retrieval failures (Prabhakar & Ghetti 2019). H&M should enumerate the specific pattern of errors predicted by reverting to the updating system.…”

Nonhuman sequence learning findings argue against Hoerl and McCormack's two systems of temporal cognition

“…1) to which they refer presents a broad challenge to the dual-systems framework. Children may struggle to retrieve temporal sequences, not because they revert to updating, but rather because of episodic memory retrieval failures (Prabhakar & Ghetti 2019). H&M should enumerate the specific pattern of errors predicted by reverting to the updating system.…”