Episodic memory and episodic foresight in 3- and 5-year-old children

The development of reasoning about the temporal and causal relations among past, present, and future events

“…Other lines of research on children's temporal cognition have documented similar developmental changes in other aspects of experiencing and representing time; work on mental time travel suggests that beginning at around 4 years of age, children acquire analogous competence in both episodic memory and episodic foresight to act on past experiences and plan competently for the future (Suddendorf, Nielsen, & von Gehlen, 2011;Suddendorf & Redshaw, 2013). Work on the development of temporal language suggests that at around the same time, children begin to give verbal reports about their past and possible future experiences (Friedman, 2004;Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011) and they begin to mentally decenter from their subjective present when asked about another person's thoughts at a different point in time (Cromer, 1971). Conceptually, there is much overlap of TCR with these capacities.…”

The Development of Temporal Concepts: Learning to Locate Events in Time

“…Studies of children's autobiographical memory consistently suggest that children of this age can provide at least some details of remote past events, and can use the past tense to do so (e.g., Peterson, 2002;Peterson & Rideout, 1998;Weist & Zevenbergen, 2008). By the time children are three, they can provide (albeit often sparse) information about events due to occur at some point in the future using the appropriate tense (e.g., Hayne et al, 2011;Quon & Atance, 2010). Even if children's descriptions of past and future events are often both highly scaffolded by adults' questioning and piecemeal in nature , these findings suggest that children in this age range can do more than simply think about the locations of events in repeated event sequences, meaning that their temporal cognition differs fundamentally from that of younger children.…”

Securing the future by remembering the past: But just when does this past and future begin to develop?

“…Of course, such a requirement rules out nonverbal organisms (nonhuman animals and preverbal humans) because there is no way for them to report their conscious experiences when remembering the past or planning for the future. Although I will not pursue this issue in depth here, it is important to point out that (1) autonoetic awareness may be a simple epiphenomenal component that arises in adult humans when remembering the past or anticipating the future, not a necessary one, and (2) children not only fulfill all of the other requirements associated with possessing episodic memory and foresight, but, whether epiphenomenal or not, Development of Memory Futures 14 even 3-year-olds provide first person accounts of past experiences and future planning (e.g., Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011), consistent with the autonoetic requirement.…”

“…For example, when the task is made easier for younger children (e.g., by providing a visual timeline so they can physically track both the past and the future), differences in the performance of 3-to 5-year-olds virtually disappear (Hayne et al, 2011). Similarly, in a nonverbal task (remembering to save marbles for a future task), there were no differences in the amount saved among 3-to 5-year-olds (Metcalf & Atance, 2011).…”

“…More direct tests of children's episodic foresight have been conducted using both nonverbal (e.g., Metcalf & Atance, 2011) and verbal (e.g., Atance & Sommerville, in press;Hayne, Gross, McNamee, Fitzgibbon, & Tustin, 2011;Richmond & Pan, 2013;Scarf, Gross, Colombi, & Hayne, 2013) tests. Like the research on prospective memory, developmental differences in episodic foresight can appear and disappear depending on the procedure implemented to examine children's future planning abilities.…”