A remarkable feature of the human mind is its capacity to momentarily disengage from the immediate environment in order to contemplate hypothetical future scenarios. This thesis focuses on human prospection, investigating some of the methods used to assess it, its cognitive properties and the functional relevance of this extraordinary ability to anticipate and pre-experience future contingencie...

All animals can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've experienced before. But humans can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've never experienced by simulating those events in their minds. Scientists are beginning to understand how the brain simulates future events, how it uses those simulations to predict an event's hedonic consequences, and why these predictions so of...

In two experiments we examined the role of emotion, specifically worry, anxiety, and mood, on prospection during decision-making. Worry is a particularly relevant emotion to study in the context of prospection because high levels of worry may make individuals more aversive toward the uncertainty associated with the prospect of obtaining future improvements in rewards or states. Thus, high level...

Mental simulation is a hallmark feature of human cognition, allowing features from memories to be flexibly used during prospection. While past studies demonstrate the preservation of real-world features such as size and distance during mental simulation, their temporal dynamics remains unknown. Here, we compare mental simulations to navigation of routes in a large-scale spatial environment to t...

We investigate the common development of children's ability to "look back in time" (retrospection, episodic remembering) and to "look into the future" (prospection). Experiment 1 with 59 children 5 to 8.5 years old showed mental rotation, as a measure of prospection, explaining specific variance of free recall, as a measure of episodic remembering (retrospection) when controlled for cued recall...

What do we think about when our mind wanders? We asked 88 students to read an instructional text and watch a film (each 20 minutes) and report whenever they found themselves zoning out. Each time they did, we asked them to report their thoughts and what, if anything, triggered them. We then categorized these thoughts (1208 in total) based on their content, and found that in contrast with previo...

We explore a coherent combination of two jointly implemented logic programming based systems, namely those of Evolution Prospection and Intention Recognition, to address a number of issues pertinent for Ambient Intelligence (AmI), namely in the home environment context. The Evolution Prospection system designs and implements several kinds of well-studied preferences and useful environment-trigg...