The role of prospective cognition in human decision-making: proximate and ultimate perspectives

Abstract

The future abounds with potential opportunities and threats. While we cannot know for certain what most of this future holds, a fundamental feature of the human mind is the ability to disengage from the here-and-now to anticipate, plan, and prepare. Having the future in mind enables people to modify their decision-making in diverse and flexible ways in line with the consequences of their choices. In this thesis, I explore the role of prospective cognition in the intertemporal trade-offs we make between immediate and delayed outcomes, the anxieties we feel, and the steps we take now to compensate for our anticipated limitations.In chapter one, I survey the scientific history of prospective cognition in psychology and related disciplines, and outline the evolutionary importance of foresight and decision- making. In chapter two, I review the role of prospective cognition in intertemporal decision- making and present a mechanistic model that outlines how the prediction of likelihoods and emotions enables people to make more flexible intertemporal trade-offs. Chapter three presents the results of an experiment in which participants were cued to imagine positive future events while they made intertemporal choices. Imagining the future reduced the rate at which people discounted the value of future monetary rewards. It also marginally (but not consistently) reduced their hypothetical alcohol demand patterns, suggesting the effects of prospective cognition on ‘impulsivity’ may be limited to particular domains.I survey the human capacity and tendency to imagine future threats in chapter four, wherein I present a taxonomy of threat-related cognition. This taxonomy connects disparate approaches to anxiety and mental time travel – our capacity to remember personal past events and imagine future ones. I outline how foresight empowers people to manage anticipated threats, but also how these same processes lie at the heart of contemporary anxiety disorders. In chapter five, I present results from a cross-country analysis into the role of threat in intertemporal choice. Across countries, a lower life expectancy was associated with both a smaller percentage of people willing to wait for a larger but delayed reward, as well as women having their first child at a younger age. These results, which hold after controlling for global region and gross-domestic product per capita, dovetail with findings at the individual level to suggest environmental threats can be an important predictor of intertemporal decision-making. To directly address the causal influence of imagining future threats on decision-making, in chapter six I present the results of a large-scale experiment in which participants were cued to imagine future threats or positive events while making intertemporal choices and risk-taking decisions. Being cued to imagine either type of future scenario led participants to discount the value of future rewards significantly less than engaging in emotionally neutral control imagery, but cued foresight had no effect on risk-taking. Thus, while these results again replicate previous findings that cued foresight can reduce delay discounting, they indicate that this effect is not dependent on emotional valence and suggest further boundaries on its generalizability to other decision-making domains.In chapter seven, I survey some of the most critical functions of the prospective mind. In each case, I argue that human metacognition – our ability to think about our thinking – bolsters these capacities. People can reflect on and compensate for the natural limits of their foresight. For example, we make contingency plans because we appreciate that initial predictions may turn out to be wrong. I suggest that the processes involved in monitoring, controlling, and augmenting prospective cognition represent an important and understudied parallel of metamemory that should be called metaforesight. Chapter eight is an experiment into the developmental origins of metaforesight: how do children acquire the ability to compensate for their future failures? I show that even children as young as four years of age are capable of rapidly learning to set themselves reminders to compensate for future memory limits. However, the selective deployment of this behaviour congruent with cognitive demand increased gradually throughout childhood – in line with a body of literature on the development of metacognitive control.Chapter nine is a general discussion, wherein I suggest avenues for future research into the mechanisms and development of prospection in decision-making, as well as the clinical relevance of the findings in this thesis. Finally, I reflect more broadly on the evolutionary legacy of prospective cognition in human decision-making and explore ways it could be leveraged to better steer us forwards. Overall, this thesis underscores why making decisions with the future in mind is such a powerful element of the human psychological toolkit.

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