Tomorrow will be different: Children's ability to incorporate an intervening event when thinking about the future.

Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved based solely on representations of the present. To overcome this limitation, we modified an existing task such that children could not simply rely on a representation of the present to succeed (i.e., the correct answer for "right now" was different than the correct answer for "tomorrow"). A sample of 117 4- to 7-year-olds (64 girls and 53 boys) from Ottawa, Canada, and surrounding area, who were predominantly European Canadian (78.6% of sample) and had a family income of over $100,000 CAN (66.1% of sample) participated. Children remembered the information required to solve our task, and there were age-related changes in performance, but only 7-year-olds made an adaptive future-oriented decision significantly more often than chance. With the task modification removed (so the correct answer for the present and the future was the same), even 4-year-olds were above chance. Our work challenges the notion that starting at age 4, children solve behavioral tasks of future thinking by acting on their representations of the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's behavior and spontaneous talk in a future thinking task.

We explored 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 120) "explicit" and "spontaneous" future-oriented cognition. Specifically, children had to think ahead to meet a future physiological need (desire for food) or psychological need (avoiding boredom). One group of children alternated between a room with candy and a room without candy, spending 3 min per visit. Children were explicitly asked which room they wanted to put extra candy in for a future visit to the lab (correct answer: room without candy). A second group of children underwent the same procedure but with toys as the resource instead of food (a replication of Atance et al. in J Exp Child Psychol 129:98-109, 2015). In the food condition, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds all placed candy in the correct room above chance, but only 4- and 5-year-olds were above chance in the toy condition. Overall, 4- and 5-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds, and children performed better in the food condition than the toy condition. Children's spontaneous (or "involuntary") future thinking was assessed by coding their utterances while in the two rooms. Children who solved the explicit task uttered more task-relevant future and past statements than children who failed. Examining spontaneous talk also allowed us to explore children's spontaneous "solving" of the task before being asked an explicit test question. This research highlights the importance of varying stimuli in future thinking tasks and developing methods to capture spontaneous/involuntary future thinking in young children.

"Will I know more in the future than I know now?" Preschoolers' judgments about changes in general knowledge.

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess-for example, that when they are grown-ups, they will know what the words on a newspaper say. We also compared this understanding to children's understanding that adults have knowledge that children do not. To address the possibility that children's correct responses stemmed from a general rule that "adults know everything," we also included questions to which adults could not know the answer. Results show that children's understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess and that adults possess knowledge that children do not improves substantially during the preschool years. Moreover, only the 5-year-olds in our study acknowledged that certain things are "unknowable," even by adults. Finally, children's performance did not differ as a function of whether they were asked about their own future knowledge or an adult's current knowledge. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of perspective-taking and mental state reasoning, future thinking, and children's motivation to learn. (PsycINFO Database Record

Older (but not younger) preschoolers understand that knowledge differs between people and across time.

We examined 3- to 5-year-olds' understanding of general knowledge (e.g., knowing that clocks tell time) by investigating whether (1) they recognize that their own general knowledge has changed over time (i.e., they knew less as babies than they know now), and (2) such intraindividual knowledge differences are easier/harder to understand than interindividual differences (i.e., Do preschoolers understand that a baby knows less than they do?). Forty-eight 3- to 5-year-olds answered questions about their current general knowledge ('self-now'), the general knowledge of a 6-month-old ('baby-now'), and their own general knowledge at 6 months ('self-past'). All age groups were significantly above chance on the self-now questions, but only 5-year-olds were significantly above chance on the self-past and baby-now questions. Moreover, children's performance on the baby-now and self-past questions did not differ. Our findings suggest that younger preschoolers do not fully appreciate that their past knowledge differs from their current knowledge, and that others may have less knowledge than they do. We situate these findings within the research on knowledge understanding, more specifically, and cognitive development, more broadly.

How do episodic and semantic memory contribute to episodic foresight in young children?

Humans are able to transcend the present and mentally travel to another time, place, or perspective. Mentally projecting ourselves backwards (i.e., episodic memory) or forwards (i.e., episodic foresight) in time are crucial characteristics of the human memory system. Indeed, over the past few years, episodic memory has been argued to be involved both in our capacity to retrieve our personal past experiences and in our ability to imagine and foresee future scenarios. However, recent theory and findings suggest that semantic memory also plays a significant role in imagining future scenarios. We draw on Tulving's definition of episodic and semantic memory to provide a critical analysis of their role in episodic foresight tasks described in the developmental literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions of research that could further our understanding of how both episodic memory and semantic memory are intimately connected to episodic foresight.