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.[1][2][3]
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- ^ Szpunar, Karl K.; Spreng, R. Nathan; Schacter, Daniel L. (30 December 2014). "A taxonomy of prospection: Introducing an organizational framework for future-oriented cognition: Fig. 1". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (52): 18414–18421. Bibcode:2014PNAS..11118414S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1417144111. PMC 4284580. PMID 25416592.
- ^ Suddendorf, T; Bulley, A; Miloyan, B (December 2018). "Prospection and natural selection". Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 24: 26–31. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.01.019. S2CID 53180176.