Author: Dr Tian-xiao Yang, NACN lab

Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to complete planned future tasks, is essential for school-age children to organize their daily routines effectively. For example, children need to remember to submit a parent-signed form when they see their teacher (an event-based PM task), or recall to play basketball with friends on Saturday afternoon (a time-based PM task). However, the PM ability of school-age children is still developing and error-prone, which has a negative impact on their daily lives. Therefore, how to effectively enhance children’s PM is an important research question worth examining. Previous studies have indicated that both episodic future thinking and cue saliency methods enhance PM performance in school-age children, but no prior research directly compared their effects, mechanisms, and influences of PM type/executive functions in this population.

To address this, Dr. Tian-xiao Yang and colleagues from NACN lab at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted two experiments with 126 children aged 8-12 years each. Experiment 1 used trial-based tasks, game-like computer tasks, and scenario-based tasks to examine the effects and mechanisms of episodic future thinking and cue saliency on event-based PM, exploring the moderating role of executive functions on the enhancement effects. Experiment 2 employed similar methods to examine their effects on time-based PM.

Findings revealed salient cues significantly improved children's time-based and event-based PM by facilitating automatic retrieval of PM intentions. Salient time cues also altered children's time-monitoring strategies, promoting proactive cognitive resource reallocation from time monitoring to current tasks. In contrast, episodic future thinking failed to improve children's time-based or event-based PM, indicating a need to optimize guidance for more effective future episodic construction. Notably, children's shifting ability moderated cue saliency effect on time-based PM: those with lower shifting ability benefited more from salient cues.

This study systematically compared the two methods, confirming the advantages of cue saliency relative to episodic future thinking on PM in school-age children. The findings provide evidence and insights for schools and parents to enhance children's PM and self-management skills.

This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund (Education)/The National Education Sciences Planning Schemes (BBA230057).

The paper is published online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Chen-wei Yuan, a master's graduate from the Institute of Psychology, is the first author, and Dr. Tian-xiao Yang from the same institute is the corresponding author.

Yuan, C., Yang, T.,* Zuber, S., Su, X., An, F., Li, S., Wang, D., Wang, Y., & Chan, R. C. K. (2025). Comparing effects of episodic future thinking and cue salience to improve different types of prospective memory in typically developing school-age children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 227, 106305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106305