Choosing a Winter Coat over a Bathing Suit: The Role of Executive Functions in Preschoolers’ Episodic Foresight

Episodic foresight, the ability to mentally project the self into the future, has gained considerable attention in cognitive psychology research. Research involving young children is particularly relevant because episodic foresight shows an accelerated development during early childhood. Several theories propose that executive functions are related to episodic foresight and its development. However, although previous empirical studies suggest a possible relationship between these two domais in young children, the evidence remains inconclusive. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between executive functions and episodic foresight in preschool children. To this end, we administered an episodic foresight task (Picture-book task) and a battery for the assessment of the three central executive processes (i.e., working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility) together with a global measure of executive functioning (HTKS task). After controlling for age and receptive vocabulary, none of the individual executive function tasks showed correlations with episodic foresight. However, the global measure of executive functions that jointly assesses the three core executive processes and is more ecologically-relevant appeared as a predictor of children's ability to think and make decisions about their future. As such, this study suggests that the relationships between executive functions and episodic foresight in young children are intricate and depend on the type of tasks used for their assessment.