Prospection

In

Mental time travel refers to the ability to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (known as episodic memory), 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.^[6][7]

Examples of the functions of prospection

Episodic foresight

Episodic foresight is the capacity to imagine personal future scenarios and shape current action accordingly.^[8]

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 'affective forecasting'.^[9]

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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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 (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.^[12][13] This has been extended into real-world decisions such as in reducing the consumption of high-calorie food^[14] and increasing pro-environmental behaviours.^[15]

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

References