Assessing the role of memory in preschoolers' performance on episodic foresight tasks

A total of 48 preschoolers (ages 3, 4, and 5) received four tasks modelled after prior work designed to assess the development of "episodic foresight". For each task, children encountered a problem in one room and, after a brief delay, were given the opportunity in a second room to select...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMemory (Hove) Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 118 - 128
Main Authors Atance, Cristina M., Sommerville, Jessica A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hove Routledge 02.01.2014
Psychology Press
Subjects
Aging - psychology
Anticipation, Psychological - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child, Preschool
Cognitive development
Developmental psychology
Episodic foresight
Episodic memory
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Future thinking
Human
Humans
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Memory - physiology
Problem Solving
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Human
Preschool age
Future thinking
Memory
Cognition
Anticipation
Cognitive development
Experimental study
Performance
Episodic foresight
Child
Episodic memory
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Summary:A total of 48 preschoolers (ages 3, 4, and 5) received four tasks modelled after prior work designed to assess the development of "episodic foresight". For each task, children encountered a problem in one room and, after a brief delay, were given the opportunity in a second room to select an item to solve the problem. Importantly, after selecting an item, children were queried about their memory for the problem. Age-related changes were found both in children's ability to select the correct item and their ability to remember the problem. However, when we controlled for children's memory for the problem, there were no longer significant age-related changes on the item choice measure. These findings suggest that age-related changes in children's performance on these tasks are driven by improvements in children's memory versus improvements in children's future-oriented thinking or "foresight" per se. Our results have important implications for how best to structure tasks to measure children's episodic foresight, and also for the relative role of memory in this task and in episodic foresight more broadly.
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ISSN:0965-8211
1464-0686
DOI:10.1080/09658211.2013.820324