Spontaneous future cognitions: an integrative review

Abstract

Spontaneous future cognitions refer to mental representations about the future that enter consciousness with no immediately preceding attempt of bringing them to mind. They are studied under different terms in several areas of psychology, but with little interdisciplinary exchange of findings and theoretical developments. Different conceptions of spontaneous future cognition derive from separate literatures and are rarely considered together, leaving their potential conceptual overlaps as well as their unique features unclarified. In this article I review research on spontaneous future cognitions in relation to mind wandering, involuntary episodic future thoughts, and intrusive future imagery in cravings and clinical disorders. I conclude that more research is needed to clarify the potential functions served by spontaneous future cognitions in everyday life, under which conditions they may become dysfunctional, how they are triggered by situational cues, and how their content may be constrained by motivational factors and beliefs. The burgeoning field of spontaneous future cognitions forms a promising novel approach to the cognitive and motivational regulation of behavior in everyday life.

Spontaneous future cognition: the past, present and future of an emerging topic

“…These comparisons have resulted in several interesting insights, which can enhance the understanding of where spontaneous future cognition stands in relation to other related phenomena, and encourage crosstalk between currently separate research fields depicted in Fig. 1, a sentiment that is also expressed in the first of the papers presented by Berntsen (2019). In her review paper, Berntsen provides a definition of spontaneous future cognition and illustrates how different manifestations of future thoughts (in terms of their content) have been studied within the fields of mindwandering, spontaneous episodic future thinking and in psychopathology.…”

“…To provide a conceptual definition that encapsulates research on spontaneous future cognition so far, we use the most parsimonious and consensual account of spontaneous thought, defining the spontaneous component of future thought as unintended thought that comes to mind with little effort and little control over its content (see Fox & Christoff, 2018b;Klinger, 2009). At this early stage, we see it appropriate to leave open the relevance of other aspects such as task-relatedness (i.e., task-related versus task-unrelated thought), stimulus-relatedness (stimulus-independent versus stimulus-dependent), and cuing (i.e., internal versus external, see Klinger et al, 2018), as we believe that these factors may offer independent insights into the phenomenon (e.g., the extent to which external stimuli cues internal trains of thought that appear spontaneous), but are not yet central to our current working conceptualisation (in fact, they could be orthogonal to the spontaneous nature of future thought, in that whether a thought is cued internally or externally is independent of whether it is experienced as spontaneous) (see also Berntsen, 2019, for further discussion). Ultimately, we associate spontaneous mental processes with what has been termed System 1 processes, which stand in contrast to deliberate mental processes (termed System 2 processes, associated with high effort, and slow, analytic processes, such as planning one's weekly groceries or calculating 25 × 12.…”

“…Moreover, their experience has been related to various measures of personality, mood and psychopathology (e.g., Jones & Steel., 2012;Krans, de Bree, & Moulds, 2015;Marchetti, Koster, Klinger, & Alloy, 2016;Poerio, Totterdell, & Miles, 2013). Although research on this topic in relation to spontaneous future thoughts is scarce, Berntsen's (2019) comprehensive review demonstrates that spontaneous future thoughts may be crucially important in providing new insights about existing clinical disorders and for the development of new interventions. Emphasis on the importance of individual differences in spontaneous future cognitions and psychopathology has been reflected by the inclusion into the Special Issue of three papers on this topic by del Palacio-Gonzalez and Berntsen, by Beaty, Seli and Schacter (2019), and by Ji, Holmes, MacLeod and Murphy which used questionnaire, naturalistic experience sampling and laboratory methods, respectively.…”

“…Further evidence of spontaneous future thoughts can be found in the literature on psychological disorders (for review, see Berntsen, 2019). Since a landmark study, demonstrating that individuals with a history of attempted suicide, experience 'flash-forwards', representing vivid imagery of future suicide attempts (Holmes, Crane, Fennell, & Williams, 2007), clinical research focussing on spontaneous future thinking has gained momentum.…”

Inducing positive involuntary mental imagery in everyday life: an experimental investigation

“…It has been argued that mental time travel is an important process in our everyday functioning, for example in relation to emotion regulation, planning for the future, and decision-making (e.g., Barsics et al, 2016;Berntsen, 2019;D'Argembeau et al, 2011;Kensinger & Ford, 2020;Schacter et al, 2007) and in fact appears to be a 'default' activity that our mind engages in when there is little else to occupy it (Schacter et al, 2007). Mental imagery provides a key component of the experience of mental time travel, acting as a simulation of reality and evoking emotional, physiological, and even behavioural responses as if the imagined event was unfolding in the present (Ji et al, 2016).…”