Abstract :
[en] Episodic future thinking (EFT) – i.e., the ability to imagine specific experiences that might occur in one’s personal future – is a crucial skill, essential for many cognitive (e.g., planning) and socio-emotional (e.g., emotion regulation) abilities (Conway et al., 2019). Its development begins during the preschool years, but little is known about the mechanisms underlying this process (Busby & Suddendorf, 2005). A common assumption is that EFT relies on the memory of personal experiences (Schacter et al., 2017). In this perspective, our study explored whether preschoolers’ EFT is related to (a) their memory performance, and (b) the way their parents engage them in conversations about past events, referred to as parental reminiscing style. To this end, 50 French-speaking parent-child dyads were recruited. Children were asked to perform an EFT task in which they had to describe three activities they would do the next day. They also completed several memory tasks: two tasks assessing the accuracy of their memories about previously experienced standardized events and one laboratory memory task evaluating their ability to memorize new information (the House Test, Picard et al., 2012). To determine parental reminiscing style, we analyzed parent-child discussions of a prior standardized event (a museum visit). The results first revealed that children’s EFT was positively associated with their performance on the encoding and recognition phases of the laboratory memory task. Then, we showed that some specific components of parental reminiscing style (i.e., repetitions and metamemory talk) were positively associated with children’s EFT. Importantly, these findings have allowed us to hypothesize about the cognitive processes potentially involved in the early acquisition of EFT (e.g., binding processes) and, more broadly, converge with literature that states the role of parental reminiscing as a key determinant of early cognitive development (Fivush, 2019).
