The History and Future of Human Prospection

Abstract

In psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and philosophy, "prediction" is widely recognized as central to cognition. Mental time travel into the future is the form of cognitive prediction ("prospection") most intimately connected to adaptive human functioning. It underpins explicit goal-setting, collaborative planning, and the pursuit of creative innovation. Theories focusing on prediction have a long intellectual history. Broadly construed, they offer perhaps the best opportunity yet for a global picture of neural and cognitive functioning. Exploiting this opportunity requires building bridges between prediction-as instantiated in perception or reinforcement learning-and fully-fledged mental time travel into the future. The surge of recent work on these topics indicates consensus about the promise of prospection for understanding diverse aspects of cognition, but subfields still lack theoretical synthesis.

Subjective Time in Dementia: A Critical Review

“…While a large corpus of research demonstrates significant impairments in mental time travel to the past in dementia, our mental timelines also extend to the future, and this is likewise vulnerable to impairment ( Figure 4 ). From an evolutionary perspective, the broad capacity to anticipate events that might occur in the future—so-called “prospection”—confers immense adaptive value and flexibility across a diverse range of functions [ 1 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ]. Although a relatively newborn field, there is now sufficient evidence to conclude that the ability to mentally travel forwards in subjective time to envisage the future is deleteriously affected in dementia [ 84 ].…”

The qualitative study of scientific imagination.

“…A popular account of memory introduced by Suddendorf and Corballis (1997) now claims that remembering is just imagining the past. New accounts based on this idea defend a certain temporal symmetry of thought such that there is no difference between memory about the past and thinking about the future: Both are mental time travel (see, e.g., Bulley, 2018; Berg et al, 2021; Klein, 2013; Suddendorf, 2010; Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). The recent discovery of the aphantasia–hyperphantasia spectrum is revolutionizing the study of imagination (Dawes et al, 2020; Liu et al, 2023; Whiteley, 2021; Zeman et al, 2015, 2020).…”

6th Interdisciplinary and Virtual Conference on Arts in Education

“…The educational potentialities of the imagination have been acknowledged (Clark, Lyons 2010;Clement, Rea-Ramirez 2008) also by virtue of being future-oriented (Bulley, 2018). Defining imagination future-oriented (Bulley et al, 2020) means that its primary role is to anticipate and simulate (Barsalou, 2009) the future and critically reflect on such simulations, allowing for the visualization of the so-called second-order volitions.…”

“…They are then asked to reflect on it, to imagine and create future scenarios and express them through visual/narrative artifacts to enable reflection (Thudt et al, 2016;Chow, 2018). Starting from this formative experience, the purpose of the paper is to discuss and stimulate a reflection upon the pedagogical importance of the imagination, embracing the proposal of an imaginative education (Egan, 2005) (Bulley, 2018). Definir la imaginación future-oriented (Bulley et al, 2020) significa que su función primordial es anticipar y simular (Barsalou, 2009) el futuro y reflexionar críticamente sobre eso, permitiendo visualizar las voliciones de segundo orden.…”