psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, prospection is the generation and evaluation of mental representations of possible futures. The term therefore captures a wide array of future-oriented psychological phenomena, including the prediction of future emotion (

affective forecasting Affective forecasting, also known as hedonic forecasting or the hedonic forecasting mechanism, is the prediction of one's affect (emotional state) in the future. As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective forec ...

), the imagination of future scenarios (episodic foresight), and

planning Planning is the process of thinking regarding the activities required to achieve a desired goal. Planning is based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. Some researchers regard the evolution of forethought - the cap ...

. Prospection is central to various aspects of human

cognition Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

and

motivation Motivation is an mental state, internal state that propels individuals to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often understood as a force that explains why people or animals initiate, continue, or terminate a certain behavior at a particul ...

. Daniel Gilbert (psychologist) and Timothy Wilson coined the term in 2007. It has since become a central area of enquiry in the

cognitive sciences Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

Prospection and learning

Even fundamental

learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, Attitude (psychology), attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and ...

processes are, in some sense, forms of prospection.

Associative learning Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, non-human animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kin ...

enables individual animals to track local regularities in their environments and adapt their behaviour accordingly, in order to maximise their chances of positive outcomes and minimise risks. Animals that are capable of positive and negative states (for example pleasure and pain) can eventually learn about the consequences of their actions and thereby predict imminent rewards and punishments before they occur. This enables animals to change their current actions accordingly in line with prospective consequences.

Relationship with mental time travel

Mental time travel In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight/episodic future thinking). The term was coined b ...

refers to the ability to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (known as

episodic memory Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...

), as well as to imagine personal future events (known as episodic foresight). Mental time travel into the future (episodic foresight or episodic future thinking) is therefore one of several types of 'prospection' that refers to the capacity to simulate or imagine personal future events.

Examples of the functions of prospection

Episodic foresight

Episodic foresight is the capacity to imagine personal future scenarios and shape current action accordingly.

Predicting future emotions (affective forecasting)

The feelings evoked during episodic foresight enable people to infer how they would really feel if the event were to happen in reality. This thereby enables people to anticipate whether future events are desirable or undesirable, and ability called '

Prospective intentions

Simulating the future enables people to create intentions for future actions. Prospective memory is the form of memory that involves remembering to perform these planned intentions, or to recall them at some future point in time. Prospective memory tasks are common in everyday life, ranging from remembering to post a letter to remembering to take one's medication.

Deliberate practice

People anticipate that it is possible to shape their future self. To acquire new knowledge or additional skills, people therefore engage in repeated actions driven by the goal to improve these future capacities. This deliberate practice is essential not only for elite performance but also in the acquirement of numerous everyday feats.

Flexible decision-making

Intertemporal choices are choices with outcomes that play out over time. Such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life, ranging from routine decisions about what to eat for lunch (i.e. whether to adhere to a diet) to more profound decisions about

climate change Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in Global surface temperature, global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate variability and change, Climate change in ...

(i.e. whether to reduce current energy expenditure to avoid delayed costs). The ability to imagine future scenarios and adjust decisions accordingly may be important for making intertemporal choices in a flexible manner that accords with delayed consequences. Accumulating evidence suggests that cuing people to imagine the future in vivid detail can encourage preferences for delayed outcomes over immediate ones. This has been extended into real-world decisions such as in reducing the consumption of high-calorie food and increasing pro-environmental behaviours.

Clinical impairment

In recent years there have been a range of investigations into variation in prospection and its functions in clinical populations. Deficits to the mechanisms and functions of prospection have been observed in

Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease and the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems wit ...

and other age-related dementias,

Schizophrenia Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...

, and after brain damage (especially to the medial temporal lobes). Shifts in the content and modes of prospection have been observed in affective disorders. For example, in both clinical depression and

anxiety Anxiety is an emotion characterised by an unpleasant state of inner wikt:turmoil, turmoil and includes feelings of dread over Anticipation, anticipated events. Anxiety is different from fear in that fear is defined as the emotional response ...

there is an overrepresentation of possible negative future events. In depression, there is additionally a reduction in the generation of possible positive future events. There are also a range of changes to the representational format (i.e. whether people tend to represent the future in episodic or

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

detail) in affective disorders.

References

External links

* {{Mental processes Cognitive psychology Prediction