Prospection

In psychology, 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), the imagination of future scenarios (episodic foresight), and planning. Prospection is central to various aspects of human cognition and motivation. Daniel Gilbert (psychologist) and Timothy Wilson coined the term in 2007. It has since become a central area of enquiry in the cognitive sciences. In psychology, 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), the imagination of future scenarios (episodic foresight), and planning. Prospection is central to various aspects of human cognition and motivation. Daniel Gilbert (psychologist) and Timothy Wilson coined the term in 2007. It has since become a central area of enquiry in the cognitive sciences. Even fundamental learning processes are, in some sense, forms of prospection. Associative learning 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. 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. Episodic foresight is the capacity to imagine personal future scenarios and shape current action accordingly. 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'. 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.