These types of responses do not necessarily indicate a lack of future thinking ability; rather, they
indicate a tendency to make future-directed choices based on semantic associations. Atance and colleagues
described children’s ability to arrive at correct semantic associations, but it is not known
whether children can use semantic knowledge to plan for and accomplish future goals. To ensure that
children address questions with the future in mind, other researchers have created novel scenarios in
order to study children’s ability to extract information from specific past events to make future-directed
choices. Suddendorf and colleagues (2011) first showed children an apparatus that yielded a
sticker when using a particular tool and then, either immediately or after a delay, asked children to
select one tool from a group of tools. Importantly, children were not told for what purpose they
needed to choose a tool and were expected to infer the intentions based on their previous experience
(e.g., to get a sticker from the apparatus). The researchers found that 4-year-olds chose the correct tool
significantly more than by chance during both delay conditions, whereas 3-year-olds were above
chance only when asked immediately. These results suggest that 3-year-olds are capable of making
choices for novel future scenarios. However, younger children could not maintain this ability with
the increased recall demands of the delay condition. One explanation is that because children were
not explicitly given the goal (to obtain a sticker), they were unable to retrieve the relevant knowledge
from the past to accomplish the goal.