Why do young children forget to carry out their intentions? Exploring retrospective memory and executive contributions to 3- and 4-year-olds’ prospective memory failures

The current study examined two possible reasons why 3- and 4-year-olds forget to carry out prospective intentions. According to the Executive Framework of Prospective Memory (PM) Development (Mahy et al., 2014b), very young children struggle with encoding, storing, and retrieving the content of their intention. In contrast, older children can remember their intention, but still fail to carry it out, suggesting that their failures might be executive in nature (i.e., due to a failure in PM cue detection). One hundred and three 3- and 4-year-olds completed a PM task where they had to put a particular card in a box behind them. Children ( n = 86) who forgot to fulfill their intention were asked follow-up questions to determine whether they forgot the content of their intention (retrospective memory failure) or failed to detect the PM cue (PM cue detection failure). Children also completed independent measures of episodic retrospective memory and selective and sustained attention. Results showed that: (1) 3-year-olds often forgot the content of their intention, (2) 4-year-olds mostly remembered the content of their intention but rarely reported detecting the PM cue, (3) episodic retrospective memory was related to children’s ability to answer the retrospective memory question, and (4) selective and sustained attention was unrelated to children’s ability to answer the PM cue detection question. Four possible interpretations for why 4-year-olds were so poor at detecting the PM cue and implications for future work are discussed. • 3- and 4-year-olds completed a prospective memory task. • Children who forgot to carry out their intention were asked two questions. • 3-year-olds had trouble answering the question of what they were supposed to do. • 4-year-olds indicated that they had not seen the prospective memory cue. • Results are in line with the Executive Framework of Prospective Memory Development.