Little time travelers: Future thinking and temporal language in the second year of life

Episodic future thinking-the ability to anticipate and prepare for future events-is a central component of mental time travel. Although most research on episodic future thinking has focused on preschool-aged children, much less is known about its earliest emergence in toddlerhood. The present study investigated whether precursors of episodic future thinking, such as future-oriented object selection, can be observed in the second year of life and whether this ability is associated with temporal language use beyond general vocabulary. Eighty-one typically developing Polish toddlers (M = 22.04 months, SD = 2.24; range = 17-26 months) participated in an adapted Rooms Test. The task required children to select an object needed to solve a previously encountered problem after a 3-minute delay and a change of context. Parent-report measures assessed children's temporal term use and general vocabulary. Among children included in the main analyses (N = 74), 55% selected the target object without prompting, significantly exceeding chance performance (33%). Children who passed the task used more temporal terms and had larger general vocabularies than children who failed. Temporal term use was strongly correlated with general vocabulary and did not explain additional variance beyond age and general vocabulary. These findings indicate that precursors of episodic future thinking may already be observable during the second year of life when experimental paradigms are developmentally appropriate and employ salient, motivating task structures. They also link future-oriented task performance to emerging language abilities, while leaving the specific association between temporal language and early future-oriented behavior open for future research.