Many animal species demonstrate a capacity for basic prospection of immediate outcomes; humans can deliberately shape their environment & future capacities; prospection is resource intensive, error prone & entails costs to wellbeing

Prospection and natural selection. T Suddendorf, A Bulley, B Miloyan. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24, December 2018, Pages 26-31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.01.019

Highlights
•    Prospection, or thinking about the future, has strong adaptive significance.
•    Many animal species demonstrate a capacity for basic prospection of immediate outcomes.
•    Complex prospection in humans can involve comparison of multiple and remote future possibilities.
•    Humans can deliberately shape their environment and their own future capacities.
•    Yet, prospection is resource intensive, error prone and entails costs to wellbeing.

Abstract: Prospection refers to thinking about the future, a capacity that has become the subject of increasing research in recent years. Here we first distinguish basic prospection, such as associative learning, from more complex prospection commonly observed in humans, such as episodic foresight, the ability to imagine diverse future situations and organize current actions accordingly. We review recent studies on complex prospection in various contexts, such as decision-making, planning, deliberate practice, information gathering, and social coordination. Prospection appears to play many important roles in human survival and reproduction. Foreseeing threats and opportunities before they arise, for instance, drives attempts at avoiding future harm and obtaining future benefits, and recognizing the future utility of a solution turns it into an innovation, motivating refinement and dissemination. Although we do not know about the original contexts in which complex prospection evolved, it is increasingly clear through research on the emergence of these capacities in childhood and on related disorders in various clinical conditions, that limitations in prospection can have profound functional consequences.