Episodic future thinking as a predictor of children’s prospective memory

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship among retrospective memory, episodic future thinking, and event-based prospective memory performance in preschool, first-grade, and second-grade children. A total of 160 children took part in the experiment. The study included participants 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 prospective memory task. Data were submitted to correlational analyses, analyses of variance (ANOVAs), and logistic regression analyses. Results showed that, overall, all of these abilities improve with age and are significantly correlated with one another. However, when partialling out age and retrospective memory, episodic future thinking and prospective memory performance remained correlated. Logistic regression further showed that age and episodic future thinking abilities were significant predictors of prospective memory performance independent of retrospective memory abilities.