When children begin to plan for the future
Third party image reference A type of memory crucial for imagining the future doesn’t seem to develop in children until the age of 5. Episodic memory lets us reflect on our past and imagine ourselves in the future. To find out when children develop this, Amanda Seed at the University of St Andrews in the UK and her colleagues devised a test for 212 children aged between 3 and 7. Third party image reference Each child was taught how to use a box that released a desirable sticker when the correct token was placed in it. An examiner showed them two differently coloured boxes and told them that one would remain on a table when they left the room, and the other would be put away. The children were later offered three tokens to choose from, in a different room. Two matched the colours of the boxes they had seen, but the third was a new colour to distract them. Only tokens of a matching colour delivered a sticker. Third party image reference Although the children weren’t t...