Three-year-olds’ difficulty in mentally representing multiple goals does not necessarily mean that
children at this age are incapable of semantic future thinking; rather, it could mean that younger
children’s ability to engage in future-oriented behavior is very limited. The results of the current study suggest that 3-year-olds have a nascent, but tenuous ability to mentally maintain and enact future
goals. Notably, they were successful only when working memory demands were minimized by including
fewer distracter items in the future goal environment. However, reducing distracter items was not
sufficient to produce accurate performance if they were also required to draw an implicit inference
and appreciate the contingent relationship between the two goals. It was not the case that 3-year-olds
were incapable of drawing inferences when the goal was made explicit (Experiment 2), but the cognitive
demands of inferential reasoning and planning for both a subgoal and a final goal that were
temporally constrained may have posed a challenging task for children at this age. However,
3-year-olds were successful in completing two noncontingent future goals in a planning task that
included few distracting elements and presented explicit goals (Experiment 3).