Thinking ahead about where something is needed: New insights about episodic foresight in preschoolers

• We developed a new behavioral paradigm to explore episodic foresight.
• Only 5-year-olds consistently drew on past experience to plan for the future.
• 3-year-olds’ difficulty with our task was not solely memorial in nature.
• Temporal distance into the future did not noticeably affect performance.

We explored 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds’ capacity to draw on a past experience that entailed the lack of a particular resource (in this case, toys) in one room, but not in another, to make an adaptive choice (i.e., place toys in the room where there were none) for a subsequent visit to the two rooms. Children’s memory for which room had toys and which room did not was explicitly assessed. Children were then queried about where they should place a new set of toys for their next visit to the rooms. In Experiment 1, where children were asked about the “distant” future, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, placed the toys in the “no-toy” room at a rate significantly higher than chance. In Experiment 2, where children were asked about the “immediate” future, correct responses of 3-year-olds were still no different from chance, those of 5-year-olds were above chance, and those of 4-year-olds trended in this direction. Our discussion centers on the importance of assessing both “memory” and “foresight” on tasks purported to assess children’s episodic foresight, the role of “temporal distance” on children’s future-oriented behavior, and implications for future research.