Future thinking: imaginative expectations for the leaky university

The motivating function of thinking about the future: expectations versus fantasies.

Two forms of thinking about the future are distinguished: expectations versus fantasies. Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing one's thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively). Participants were graduates looking for a job (Study 1), students wi...

The imaginative mind.

The astounding capacity for the human imagination to be engaged across a wide range of contexts is limitless and fundamental to our day-to-day experiences. Although processes of imagination are central to human psychological function, they rarely occupy center stage in academic discourse or empirical study within psychological and neuroscientific realms. The aim of this paper is to tackle this ...

Episodic future thinking.

Thinking about the future is an integral component of human cognition - one that has been claimed to distinguish us from other species. Building on the construct of episodic memory, we introduce the concept of 'episodic future thinking': a projection of the self into the future to pre-experience an event. We argue that episodic future thinking has explanatory value when considering recent work ...

Future Thinking Rics Foundation

The Thinking Styles of University Mathematics Students

In this paper, we focus on the relationship between studying university mathematics and the ‘thinking styles’ of both undergraduate and postgraduate mathematics students. A crosssectional quantitative study (N = 238) was conducted in a large Greek university, identifying the thinking styles of second, third and fourth year undergraduates, as well as those of students following a postgraduate de...