A taxonomy of prospection: Introducing an organizational framework for future-oriented cognition

Abstract

Prospection-the ability to represent what might happen in the future-is a broad concept that has been used to characterize a wide variety of future-oriented cognitions, including affective forecasting, prospective memory, temporal discounting, episodic simulation, and autobiographical planning. In this article, we propose a taxonomy of prospection to initiate the important and necessary process of teasing apart the various forms of future thinking that constitute the landscape of prospective cognition. The organizational framework that we propose delineates episodic and semantic forms of four modes of future thinking: simulation, prediction, intention, and planning. We show how this framework can be used to draw attention to the ways in which various modes of future thinking interact with one another, generate new questions about prospective cognition, and illuminate our understanding of disorders of future thinking. We conclude by considering basic cognitive processes that give rise to prospective cognitions, cognitive operations and emotional/motivational states relevant to future-oriented cognition, and the possible role of procedural or motor systems in future-oriented behavior.prospection | simulation | prediction | intention | planning

Bias in predicted and remembered emotion

“…Semantic knowledge also scaffolds episodic representations of both past and future experiences [8]. As temporal distance from events increases, and relevant episodic details become less accessible, memories and predictions increasingly rely on semantic knowledge such as appraisals of the importance of events for personal goals [9].…”

“…• episodic memory [1][2][3]6] • semantic knowledge and appraisals [8,9] How important is this for me? How good or bad is this for me?…”

Imagining the future: A cross-cultural perspective on possible selves

“…These subjective ratings of event characteristics derive from the literature on episodic future thinking and remembering. Thus, including them also helps to connect the present research to more widely used approaches to future thinking (see Szpunar, Spreng & Schacter, 2014, for a review of different forms of future thoughts). We predicted that specific possible selves, by virtue of their specificity, would be more vivid and more rehearsed than abstract possible selves.…”

Scene Construction and Relational Processing: Separable Constructs?

“…Imagining hypothetical events often entails the construction of a detailed mental representation referred to as an episodic simulation (Szpunar et al 2014). The last decade has seen significant progress towards understanding the cognitive and neural processes underlying episodic simulation, including engagement of a "core" neural network (including the medial temporal lobes and other default mode network regions) when imagining and remembering (Schacter et al 2012), the reliance on episodic and semantic memory representations to provide the content of simulations (Schacter and Addis 2007;Irish and Piguet 2013;Klein 2013), and the importance of constructing a scene within which to situate a simulated event (Hassabis and Maguire 2007;Maguire and Mullally 2013).…”