Cognitive Aspects of Prospective Thinking Skill: An Initial Overview of an Emerging Field

Prospective thinking as a cognitive skill has been supported by numerous educational, psychological and neurological studies. Studies are supplying us with a clearer picture of how it develops from infancy to become an important survival skill. However, the road to understanding all educational, neurological and psychological processes involved in this human ability is still long to be able to generate a comprehensive taxonomy, but an evaluation of what is known is possible. The goal of this paper is to organize what is known to date and indicate issues that still need to be clarified.

Bar (2011) claims that the ability to think about the future is one important characteristic that describes the human brain. He therefore called the brain a “predictive mind.” Studies that have accumulated in the past years support Bar’s observation. The first to attempt to organize the terms relating to the prospective ability of the brain found it difficult to do it satisfactorily (Szpunar & Tulving, 2011). The researchers mainly organized the fields of study and some of the concepts that describe its nature and mechanisms. The aim here is to further continue their initial efforts and add what seems to be necessary from different disciplines for further developing a more comprehensive taxonomy.