What is "prospection"

Prospection \Pro*spec"tion\, n. The act of looking forward, or of providing for future wants; foresight.

n. 1 The action of looking forward into the future. Formed by analogy with retrospection. Not in common use, but there is some modern use and the OED gives citation back to the 19th and 17th centuries. 2 The act of prospecting for minerals. Also not in common use. 3 A search for archaeological remains, usually using modern technology, for example ground penetrating radar.

Prospection refers broadly to the generation and evaluation of mental representations of possible futures. This ability fundamentally shapes human cognition, emotion, and motivation, and yet remains an understudied field of research, according to some psychologists. For too long, say some psychologists, science has concentrated on how the past determines the present and the future; prospective psychology seeks to change this by moving prospection to the center of research on human action.

Martin Seligman played a leading role in starting the positive psychology movement, but noticed a deeper flaw in psychology: many psychologists seemed to portray humans as driven by the past. Thus, Seligman and others are leading an initiative on the study of prospective psychology, which is open to not only psychologists and neuroscientists, but also philosophers. Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada also lead the prospective psychology research movement. However, not all psychologists agree with Seligman and his colleagues that prospection has been neglected in the past psychological literature. Prospection, in the form of anticipation, was a central part of George Kelly's personal construct theory, first published in 1955.