A large proportion of adults’ thoughts turn to the future on a day-to-day basis (Cole et al., 2016), such as when planning a work meeting, an upcoming first date, or a trip to the grocery store. Some of these thoughts can be broad and unspecific (e.g., ‘I will go to Disneyland every year one day’), whereas others can be very specific, enabling us to foresee the unfolding of a day in minute details (e.g., ‘On my next birthday, my four best friends and I will visit Canada’s Wonderland. We will excitedly wait in line to try out a new rollercoaster’; Szpunar et al., 2014). Knowledge about the future –as in the former case– is termed semantic future thinking, whereas the simulation of a specific event in one’s own future –as in the latter case– is termed episodic future thinking (EFT; Atance and O’Neill, 2001). Projecting into the future to simulate specific events allows us to “pre-feel” or “pre-experience” future emotional, physiological, and cognitive states (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Szpunar et al., 2014). Future thinking holds several benefits (Schacter et al., 2017) for our decision-making and saving behavior (Ballance et al., 2022), molding personal identity (D’Argembeau et al., 2012; Barsics et al., 2016), regulating emotions (Barsics et al., 2016; Duffy and Cole, 2021), remembering to perform an action (Altgassen et al., 2017), and possibly even promoting academic success (Prabhakar et al., 2016). The adaptive function of future thinking is such that some consider it to have shaped human evolution (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997) and constitutes the raison-d’être of the ability to remember the past (Schacter et al., 2007).

Future thinking is highly adaptive and hence, unsurprisingly, researchers have tried to implement interventions to improve it. One stream of research relies on the theoretical importance of constructive episodic simulation (a flexible [re]combination of episodic details) for episodic future thinking (Schacter and Madore, 2016). Indeed, a manipulation called the “Episodic Specificity Induction” (ESI), heightens an episodic retrieval mode and brain activity in the core network (Madore et al., 2016b). This enhanced function can then ripple to subsequent tasks, including those involving problem-solving (Jing et al., 2016), creativity (Madore et al., 2015, 2016a), emotion regulation (Jing et al., 2016, 2017), and the richness of recall and future imagination (Madore et al., 2019). The ESI can entail the vivid recollection of a lab-based episodic memory (i.e., a video; Madore et al., 2014) or an autobiographical event, or the vivid imagination of a personal future event (Madore et al., 2019), all supported through a procedure inspired from the Cognitive Interview (Fisher and Geiselman, 1992). Although past- and future-oriented inductions can both produce benefits, performance on the outcome tasks may be maximized when these tasks and the induction share the same temporal orientation (e.g., a near future induction and a near future outcome task; Hallford et al., 2022).

Future thinking is also highly adaptative for children. Might prospection also be ameliorated, even on a temporary basis, in this population? Most of the work on children’s EFT has attempted to measure the ability, identify developmental milestones, and understand its relation to other cognitive abilities (reviewed in Atance, 2015). Although children’s thoughts may be less frequently future-oriented than adults’ (McCormack et al., 2019), children can still spontaneously talk about the future when trying to allocate resources in an optimal manner, and perform better when they do (Caza and Atance, 2019). As such, might a brief activity to prompt children’s talk about the future in turn benefit a host of future-oriented behaviors, including episodic simulation, prospective memory, anticipation of future needs, and delay of gratification? On the one hand, developmental research suggests that thinking about one’s own future self – even in general terms – can improve EFT in children (e.g., ‘I will have breakfast tomorrow morning’; Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019). On the other hand, ESI research in adults indicates that engaging constructive processes through the (re)combination of a multiplicity of episodic elements can enhance many related cognitive functions, including EFT itself (Madore et al., 2016a, 2019). Therefore, in the current study, we examine whether encouraging a detailed or episodic-like imagination of the future, via a child-adaptation of the ESI (e.g., ‘For breakfast tomorrow, I will eat a waffle that is going to have a smiley face with raspberries for its eyes. Its smile is going to be made of whipped cream. And it’s going to make me laugh.’) benefits EFT in children.

Childhood offers a unique backdrop to situate the challenges (e.g., the ongoing development of many cognitive abilities along with future thinking) and opportunities (e.g., possible lifelong benefits) of future thinking interventions. With age, children sharpen their ability to describe plausible future events (Quon and Atance, 2010; Coughlin et al., 2014), envision their future preferences (Bélanger et al., 2014), anticipate future needs (Atance and Meltzoff, 2005; Suddendorf et al., 2011; Ferretti et al., 2018), delay gratification (Mischel and Metzner, 1962; Mahy et al., 2020), and remember to perform an action (Mahy et al., 2014). The development of future thinking during preschool years continues throughout childhood and adolescence (Willoughby et al., 2012; Gott and Lah, 2014; Loose and Vásquez-Echeverría, 2022).

One of the most common assessments of EFT in adults, also used in children, entails prompting a mental simulation and verbal description of a specific event that could plausibly happen in the future (Levine et al., 2002; Addis et al., 2008; Willoughby et al., 2012). The verbal responses are then scored for their episodic quality or parsed for the number and type of details (Coughlin et al., 2014, 2019; Wang et al., 2014). School-aged children recount less detailed or episodic-like events than adults (Coughlin et al., 2014, 2019; Wang et al., 2014). Similarly, older children sometimes narrate more episodic-like events than younger children (Coughlin et al., 2014), as adolescents do relative to their younger peers (Willoughby et al., 2012). Recollection of past events follows a somewhat parallel trajectory (Busby and Suddendorf, 2005; Hayne et al., 2011; Coughlin et al., 2014), consistent with a strong association between episodic memory and EFT (Addis, 2018).

Several tasks assess EFT development in childhood while attempting to avoid its conflation with language by minimally relying on verbal responses (reviewed in Atance, 2018). Such tasks include the Picture-book task, Prospective memory, and Delay of gratification. The Picture-book task is meant to assess children’s ability to infer future states by showing them different scenes (e.g., road, stream, snow) and asking them to pretend they will visit them in the future (Atance and Meltzoff, 2005). The scenarios are meant to evoke a corresponding physiological need, such as the possibility of getting thirsty, getting hurt, or getting cold (Atance and Meltzoff, 2005). Successful task completion requires anticipating the physiological state in question (e.g., getting cold) to then select the most appropriate object from a set (e.g., winter coat, bathing suit, ice cubes). Children’s performance improves between 3 and 5 years old (Atance and Meltzoff, 2005), and from 6 and 7 to 8 years old (Ferretti et al., 2018).

Although not categorized as EFT tasks per se, Prospective memory and Delay of gratification engage future-oriented reasoning in ways argued to benefit function in daily life (e.g., academic success, health-related behavior; Mahy et al., 2014; Daniel et al., 2015). Prospective memory, or remembering to perform an action in the future (e.g., a child reminding the researcher to give them a gift at the end of the study), matures from childhood to adulthood (Mahy et al., 2014). Similarly, older children display a better ability to delay gratification than younger children (Mischel and Metzner, 1962; Hudson et al., 2011; Mahy et al., 2020). Delay of gratification can be assessed by offering children the choice between a smaller immediate reward (e.g., one marshmallow, sticker, or pretzel) or a larger reward later (e.g., 6 stickers; Prencipe and Zelazo, 2005). In sum, children hone their future-oriented reasoning throughout childhood, as reflected in multiple cognitive domains and a variety of tasks. Critically, from a methodological standpoint, these various tasks could be sensitive to changes initiated by an activity designed to improve EFT.

Previous research suggests EFT is malleable and amenable to amelioration in young children (e.g., Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019). For example, one training instructed parents to ask their child questions about their thoughts, feelings, and desires during past events when recollecting these events over a 6-month period (Wang et al., 2019). The added focus on the children’s cognitive and affective experiences during past events sufficed to encourage a more specific imagination of future events following the intervention (Wang et al., 2019). Briefer interventions have also been shown to have beneficial downstream effects on EFT (Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019). These shorter activities centered on drawing a picture or reading a book and some related questions. Chernyak et al. (2017) asked children to draw themselves at a specific point in time (present, near past, near future, or distant future) and then asked them a few questions about activities (near past, near future, or distant future) or sensations/perceptions (present). Leech et al. (2019), instead, changed the tense (present or future) and depiction of characters (self or other) in a story. These various task versions helped to disambiguate the key factors underlying EFT improvements among a few candidates: self-reference (e.g., thinking about the self or another child), temporal orientation (e.g., thinking about the past, present, or future), temporal distance (e.g., projecting to a near or distant time), or a combination of these. Children performed best on the Prospective memory and/or Picture-book tasks when thinking about their own self in the near future (Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019) and in the near past (Chernyak et al., 2017). Thus, the conjunction of thinking about the self and a proximal temporal distance appears optimal to foster benefits on EFT in children.

Leech et al. (2019) proposed that the vividness of the extended self might determine boosts on EFT tasks. We propose another somewhat broader hypothesis drawing from the adult literature on the ESI (Schacter and Madore, 2016; Madore et al., 2019) and episodic memory: the vividness of the events overall, not just the representation of the self, might determine the extent of EFT benefits on subsequent tasks. Indeed, events tend to be recalled with greater details in the near past/future (D’Argembeau and Van der Linden, 2004; Berntsen and Bohn, 2010) and when personal rather than about someone else (de Vito et al., 2012; Grysman et al., 2013; Verfaellie et al., 2019), consistent with studies on brain activity (Addis et al., 2004; Tanguay et al., 2020). Therefore, a conversation or story about the self within the near past or future might enhance children’s ability to engage constructive processes. The potential role of episodic processes in Chernyak et al. (2017) and Leech et al. (2019) remains ambiguous, however, because children were encouraged to consider a few elements or facts about routine/script-like events but were not prompted to generate a highly specific and detailed event. Even the gist recall of repeated events can evoke visual details and a scene, but the amount of details may not always be maximal relative to an event that is specific in time and place (Addis et al., 2011; Tanguay et al., 2022). Hence, we adapted the ESI to test whether eliciting episodic details from children about a specific event would improve their EFT.

Our study investigates the potential benefits on EFT of an ESI adapted for school-aged children and online administration (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). We recruited a somewhat older sample than Chernyak et al. (2017) and Leech et al. (2019) (6–7 years old vs. 3–5 years old) to ensure children could fully partake in this online ESI. The predominant focus of our ESI was the elaboration of a highly vivid future event (i.e., tomorrow’s breakfast), because previous studies have already demonstrated that thinking about the future, even in general terms, can produce gains on EFT tasks (Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019). Importantly, research on the Cognitive Interview in children (Memon et al., 2010; Verkampt et al., 2014) provides provisional reassurance that an ESI procedure can be adapted for young children. We investigated whether our adapted ESI could enhance a range of future-oriented abilities (i.e., recollection/imagination of an event, delay of gratification, anticipating future states, and prospective memory). We compared ESI to a control condition that entailed describing a picture (i.e., a child having breakfast). Thus, the control condition involved no episodic (re)construction of an event, but had a similar format and content. The developmental and adult literature (reviewed above) converge to suggest that children in the ESI condition will perform better than children in the control condition on EFT tasks. Based on Chernyak et al. (2017) and Leech et al.’s (2019) results, we expected greater differences between the two groups on the Picture-book and Prospective memory tasks compared to the Delay of gratification task. In addition, based on Madore et al.’s (2019) findings, we expected to see the greatest differences between the two groups on the amount of details produced in verbal description of past and future events. More precisely, we hypothesized that the greatest differences between the two conditions would be found for the imagination of an event in the near future, which temporally matched the ESI (Hallford et al., 2022). Our study’s main hypotheses and analyses were pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. ¹

EFT has significant ramifications for decision-making, creativity, and problem-solving; as such, finding ways to enhance EFT in children, even temporarily, warrants investigation. Our adaptation of a future-oriented episodic specificity induction for young children (6 and 7 years old) was successful in facilitating the imagination of a richly detailed future event, as reflected in the number of internal details during the induction and subjective measures of vividness. All children imagined tomorrow’s breakfast, an event for which children typically have control (Quon and Atance, 2010), allowing for greater standardization of the procedure and consistency across children. Like Chernyak et al. (2017), we asked about a daily event that was anchored in a relatively near future (i.e., tomorrow morning), but also focused on drawing out a highly detailed description of a single event. The control condition was well matched to the ESI condition overall. It unfolded within a social interaction with the researcher who asked questions about a picture showing a child having breakfast. Hence, the format and questions were similar between the two conditions, but the control condition did not involve the construction of an event nor a future-oriented component. Children described more detailed specific events on our Recollection/Imagination outcome task following the ESI than the control condition. Follow-up analyses showed the effect was the strongest when imagining an event in the distant future. However, our significant effect (contrasting conditions on trials overall) was not retained when using the robust ANOVA. We also did not find a difference between the ESI and Control conditions in terms of the episodicity scores in the Recollection/Imagination task. In this sense, the effects of our ESI were weaker than anticipated. Indeed, we expected an effect size larger than η² _p  = 0.11 (based on Chernyak et al., 2017), but obtained an effect size of only η² _G  = 0.05. The additional outcome tasks, administered later in the study, also did not show benefits of ESI. Although there might be ways to improve how an ESI is administered to young children, a very real possibility that has recently been supported by empirical work in other areas is that there are limited benefits of relying on EFT to ameliorate performance on future-oriented tasks in young children. For example, immediately preceding “cues” to think about future events did not help (and maybe even harmed) performance on a Delay of gratification task in children aged 4–5 years (Burns et al., 2021) and 8–12 years old (Canning et al., 2023). This contrasts with the positive effects seen in adults (Ballance et al., 2022; Rösch et al., 2022).

It is unclear when an ESI could be expected to produce sufficiently strong effects, if indeed ESI depends on a mature “episodic” system. The hippocampus, a critical structure for episodic constructive processes, continues to develop along with episodic memory into adolescence (Botdorf et al., 2022). Consistent with this, children in our study described specific events that were sparse in details (mean of 3 to 10 details per trial/condition) on our Recollection/Imagination outcome task, often falling short of conveying episodic construction. That is, many of the events children provided read more like a “to-do list” than a true pre-experiencing of a future event. Thus, aiming to achieve a criterion of episodic richness in children during ESI may be too cognitively taxing as illustrated by the duration of the ESI induction (~14 min on average). Language and semantic demands, as well as episodic demands, may also be greater in children than adults as exemplified in this participant’s statement: “It’s pretty hard to explain all this stuff I do that I wanna do.” In this sense, ESI could have depleted the cognitive resources and minimized positive effects of ESI on subsequent tasks, including the Recollection/Imagination task. A less stringent criterion or a focus on the most vividly imagined aspects (i.e., scene, actions, self) may help to avoid fatigue. The rating of visual clarity along with inspection of the data suggest that imagining other people in the future was particularly challenging during our ESI. In adults, the ESI has been adapted to shift to emphasize either spatial or temporal information, altering the downstream effects of ESI (Sheldon et al., 2019). Adapting ESI for children may also entail tailoring the set of themes and questions to the mechanisms thought to underlie the outcome task of interest. For example, episodic elaborations on actions might be particularly suitable to foster prospective memory improvements (Leech et al., 2019; Cottini et al., 2021), whereas the elaboration of thoughts and feelings might benefit emotion regulation.

Chernyak et al. (2017) and Leech et al.’s (2019) success in improving EFT may come in part from capitalizing on the burgeoning general and personal semantic memory systems (e.g., knowledge about the world, personal identity, and personal events) rather than the episodic memory system. Indeed, episodic memory depends on semantic memory (Greenberg and Verfaellie, 2010), and knowledge “scaffolds” episodic future thinking (D’Argembeau and Mathy, 2011; Irish and Piguet, 2013). The developmental literature has long recognized the role of the development of the self and semantic memory in facilitating the development of episodic memory (Fivush, 2011), and to some extent EFT (Martin-Ordas et al., 2014). Thus, future-oriented interventions might engender benefits because of their emphasis on strengthening relevant knowledge structures (e.g., reactivating information, adding new information, and/or creating new links between pieces of information). Accordingly, relying on children’s further developed semantic memory might help to constrain intervention duration and sustain engagement. Hence, younger children may benefit most from a semantic specificity (or semantic richness) induction to bolster knowledge relevant to the future. A “semantic specificity induction” would have antecedents in gist-based inductions (Grilli et al., 2019) and activities to develop a stronger sense of self (Jacquez et al., 2020; Van der Aar et al., 2022). Research on construal level theory further indicates that a more abstract versus concrete mode of thinking can foster cognitive benefits (Trope and Liberman, 2010; Liberman and Trope, 2014), including for future thinking in young children (Bélanger et al., 2014; Lee and Atance, 2016). Alternatively (or conjointly), projecting oneself into the future, even briefly and with relatively little contextual specificity might suffice to enhance performance on some future-oriented tasks in children (e.g., Cottini et al., 2021).

The cognitive load of our ESI could also perhaps be reduced through a shift to past-oriented ESI, given that future thinking in general is more demanding and less rich than episodic memory (Coughlin et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2014). Similarly, we found that children generated more details and more specific events on past-oriented than future-oriented trials during the Recollection/Imagination outcome task. A past-oriented ESI, like the original version (Madore et al., 2014), might carry a unique advantage to encourage episodic elaboration at lower cognitive cost in children. Moreover, the use of a video for the encoding of a past event would simplify the standardization of the procedure. Importantly, even though a future-oriented ESI appears to hold modest promise in comparison with other future-oriented interventions (Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019), an ESI could still produce some benefits in some children and at some ages. Our sample size did not allow for the examination of individual factors, but the high variability indicates ESI could be particularly advantageous for some children. Thus, investigation is still warranted to delineate the relative importance of episodic elaboration, semantic elaboration, projecting into the past/future, and individual characteristics.

As pointed out in the introduction, cognitive development creates particular challenges for future-thinking interventions. There are also several degrees of freedom when designing an ESI suitable for young children. For example, drawing could be leveraged as a tool to facilitate episodic elaboration and stimulate engagement (Chernyak et al., 2017; Tran et al., 2022). On a cautionary note, however, initial in-person piloting (pre-pandemic) revealed that a drawing and magnet activity can encourage descriptions of unrelated and unrealistic events rather than facilitate the elaboration of a single future event. The event selected for use in the ESI offers yet another degree of freedom. In this study, the pandemic context (e.g., during lockdown) and online administration severely constrained the type of events that could be imagined in the future. Subsequent research should examine a broader range of events (both during the induction and outcome tasks). The person administering ESI constitutes another moving piece. Although researchers have administered ESI in adults, parents could be advantageous allies to help elicit specific events in children (Wang et al., 2019; Shin et al., 2020). The common ground (cf. Brown-Schmidt and Duff, 2016) could facilitate the communication and exploration of episodic elements in future events. Therefore, another avenue for a child-friendly ESI may be to involve parents, akin to Wang et al. (2019), but using a short-duration intervention. Lastly, initial in-person piloting guided the choice of an interview-style ESI with children. On the one hand, ESI influences the “construction” rather than “elaborative” phase when imaging future events (Madore et al., 2016b), suggesting less support would be desirable. On the other hand, the developing communicative and episodic abilities could justify a heightened level of scaffolding. Future research will need to establish the optimal level and format of support.

Future thinking permeates the daily lives of children and their parents: A parent prepares a glass of milk at the request of their child only to discover minutes later that their child has lost interest in the drink. A child does not put a pet back in its cage, failing to foresee the damage that could ensue. A child does not anticipate the boredom of a rainy day on a camping trip and fails to bring indoor games. Educational pursuits could inspire countless additional examples. The improvement of future thinking, even on a temporary basis, holds promise for immediate and long-term benefits. Our child-friendly ESI demonstrated potential immediate benefits on the recollection and imagination of events through an increase of details. In contrast, the minimally-verbal outcome tasks offered no hints of improvement, possibly due to an order effect or the cognitive functions involved in the tasks. Therefore, we found no indication that this version of ESI could translate to better choices for the future or remembering actions in children. Even though we conclude on the limited benefits of relying on the episodic memory system at young ages, our findings along with others (e.g., Chernyak et al., 2017; Leech et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019) support the exciting prospect of achieving EFT improvement in the daily lives of children.

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because of ethical restrictions. End-stage data will be made available. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to AT, atang027@uottawa.ca.

The studies involving humans were approved by Health Sciences and Sciences Research Ethics Board of the University of Ottawa. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The Ethics Committee/Institutional Review Board waived the requirement of written informed consent for participation from the participants or the participants’ legal guardians/next of kin because of the online administration; verbal consent/assent were obtained.

AT, OG, JA, GA, and CA: conceptualization and methodology. AT: formal analysis and visualization. OG and JA: investigation. CA: resources, supervision, and funding acquisition. AT, OG, JA, and GA: data curation. AT and OG: writing – original draft. GA, OG, JA, and CA: writing – review and edition. AT and CA: project administration. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.