Young Children's Thinking About the Future

Abstract

Thinking about the future has become a focus of study in both adult and childhood cognition. Of special interest is the capacity to mentally pre-experience future events that involve the self (or episodic future thinking) and how this capacity relates to other aspects of cognition, including memory. In this article, I review developmental psychologists’ approaches to exploring this construct in preschool-age children. I highlight the strengths and limits of these approaches and suggest ways to further develop tasks that test future thinking. I then provide a brief overview of theories arguing for close links between episodic future thinking and memory, and episodic future thinking and theory of mind, along with relevant developmental data. I conclude by discussing challenges and directions in this area of research, including the need to identify more clearly the behaviors that reflect future thinking ability and when these develop.