Episodic future thinking and prospective memory in children: Which comes first?

The primary goal of this study was to explore the relationship among retrospective memory, episodic future thinking (EFT), and prospective memory (PM) in first and second grade preschool children. The PM task involved a pro-social intention. One hundred twenty children (67 boys and 53 girls) took part in the experiment. Participants were from four age groups: 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and 7-year-olds. Participants were administered a recognition memory task, a task to test the ability to pre-experience future events, and an event-based PM task. The degree of social importance of the to-be-performed action was manipulated. For each age group (N= 30), half of the participants were assigned to the high importance, whereas the other half to the low importance condition. Data were submitted to correlational analyses, ANOVAs and logistic regression analyses. Results showed that performance on the different tasks improves with age. More interestingly, results of the regression analysis showed that, independently of retrospective memory abilities, age, EFT abilities, and social importance of the to-be-performed action were significant predictors of PM performance. These novel findings suggest that the development of EFT abilities is at the root of PM functioning and that the latter is modulated by social relevance of future actions.