psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

, 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 foreca ...

), the imagination of future scenarios (episodic foresight), and planning. Prospection is central to various aspects of human cognition and motivation.

Daniel Gilbert (psychologist) Daniel Todd Gilbert (born November 5, 1957) is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his research with Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia on a ...

and Timothy Wilson coined the term in 2007. It has since become a central area of enquiry in the cognitive sciences.

Prospection and learning

Even fundamental learning 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, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of l ...

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 coine ...

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 Prospective memory is a form of memory that involves remembering to perform a planned action or recall a planned intention at some future point in time.McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2007). ''Prospective memory: An overview and synthesis of an ...

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 In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...

(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 and other age-related

dementias Dementia is a disorder which manifests as a set of related symptoms, which usually surfaces when the brain is damaged by injury or disease. The symptoms involve progressive impairments in memory, thinking, and behavior, which negatively affec ...

Schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social wit ...

, and after brain damage (especially to the medial temporal lobes). Shifts in the content and modes of prospection have been observed in

affective disorders The affective spectrum is a spectrum of affective disorders (mood disorders). It is a grouping of related psychiatric and medical disorders which may accompany bipolar, unipolar, and schizoaffective disorders at statistically higher rates than ...

. For example, in both clinical depression and

anxiety Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat wh ...

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 detail) in affective disorders.

References

External links

*{{cite web , title=Publications: Prospective Psychology , url=http://www.prospectivepsych.org/content/publications , website=prospectivepsych.org , accessdate=13 August 2015 Cognitive psychology Prediction