Young kids are surprisingly bad at using memory to plan ahead

We used to think that planning for the future was a skill most children have by the age of four, but now it seems that we don't develop the kind of memory needed to do this until we're older. 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 between the ages of three and seven. 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 boxes of different colours and told them that one would remain on a table while they left the room, and the other would be put away.