By the third year of life, both children’s talk and
various aspects of their behaviour (e.g. preparing for
a future event) reflect an awareness of the future40–43.
By 3 years of age, children’s talk also appears to
include an understanding that the future is not
simply a recapitulation of the past, but is, by nature,
uncertain44. In examining children’s use of modal
terms such as ‘maybe’and ‘probably’to indicate
uncertainty, we found that, between the ages of 2 yrs
and 2 yrs 11 months, children expressed uncertainty
in connection with ongoing events in the physical
world44 (e.g. ‘probably in there’) and with respect to
future intentions (e.g. ‘maybe I’ll go away’) and events
(e.g. ‘Mommy, what might happen if doctors are
sick?’). Thus children’s construction of the future was
not based solely on past events but also included
novel projections, predictions, and hypotheses.
Children’s accounts of a script and a plan
increasingly differ from 3 to 5 years of age. In a
pretend play scenario, Hudson et al.
45 asked children
to provide a ‘script’(e.g. ‘Can you tell me what
happens when you go grocery shopping?’) or a ‘plan’
(e.g. ‘Can you tell me a plan for going grocery
shopping?’). By 5 years of age, children’s accounts in
the planning condition (but not the script condition)
included significantly more preparatory and
decision-making activities than those of the younger
children. Children’s ability to provide a prevention
for a given common mishap (e.g. forgetting your
money) also increased with age.
Preschool-aged children also reveal a growing
ability to consider the future consequences of their
current behaviour46,47. In one such study, children
were given a modified delay of gratification task in
which they were offered the option of obtaining one
sticker immediately, or two stickers in the future46.
Only by 4 years of age did children begin to prefer
the larger delayed reward over the smaller
immediate one. The authors argued that the
3-year-olds were impeded, in part, ‘by the
introduction of a situation in which they were
required to imagine future desires that conflicted
with their current desires’ (Ref. 46, p. 207).
Thus, as early as age 2, children’s talk and
behaviour reveal an awareness of the future, but it
does not appear to be until 4 or 5 years of age that
children begin to demonstrate more sophisticated
planning and anticipatory behaviours.
Conclusion
Episodic future thinking, as we have defined it, refers
to an ability to project the self forward in time to
pre-experience an event. It may be a distinguishing
feature of our species (see Box 2). We have argued
that episodic future thinking can hold explanatory
value when considering recent work on such diverse
topics as prospective memory, the planning fallacy,
goal pursuit, and depression and anxiety.
Neuropsychological evidence suggests that the frontal
lobes constitute an important part of a wider neuronal
network involved in episodic future thinking. Its
developmental emergence might take place by the age
of 5 yrs. The importance of episodic future thinking to
human experience and behaviour remains to be fully
explored, but glimpses of its potential importance for
adaptive human functioning (e.g. positive health
practices) can be found in current research.