The ability to maintain prospective memory (PM)—the capacity to remember to complete planned future tasks—is fundamental for school-age children to organize daily routines. Whether recalling to submit a parent-signed form upon seeing a teacher (an event-based PM task) or remembering to play basketball with friends on Saturday afternoon (a time-based PM task), children’s developing PM skills often lead to errors that impact daily life. 

While prior studies have indicated that both episodic future thinking (EFT) and cue saliency methods can enhance PM performance in this population, no research had directly compared their effects, underlying mechanisms, or the influence of PM type and executive functions.

In a recent study published on May 23 in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Dr. YANG Tian-xiao and colleagues from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have shown that cue-saliency is superior to EFT methods in improving time- and event-based PM in school-age children.

The team conducted two experiments involving 126 children aged 8 to 12 years each. Experiment 1 used trial-based, game-like computer, and scenario tasks to assess EFT and cue saliency on event-based PM, exploring how executive functions moderated results. Experiment 2 applied similar methods to time-based PM.

Their findings revealed that salient cues significantly improved both time-based and event-based PM by facilitating the automatic retrieval of PM intentions. Salient time cues also altered children’s time-monitoring strategies, promoting the proactive reallocation of cognitive resources from timekeeping to ongoing tasks. 

In contrast, EFT failed to enhance performance in either PM type, indicating a need to optimize guidance for more effective construction of future episodic scenarios. Notably, children’s shifting ability moderated the effect of cue saliency on time-based PM: those with lower shifting ability derived greater benefits from salient cues, as external cues served as more critical retrieval aids for memory processes.

Taken together, these findings indicate superiority of cue saliency over EFT in boosting children’s PM, providing schools and parents with evidence-based strategies to enhance self-management skills. By demonstrating how environmental cues can automate memory retrieval, the research offers practical implications for educational interventions aimed at supporting children’s cognitive development.

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