New insights into the cognitive and functional properties of human prospection
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Neroni2016.doc (6.641Mb)
Date
28/06/2016Author
Neroni, Maria Adriana
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Abstract
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 contingencies. Two
experiments carried out with young healthy participants show that the methods used
to elicit prospection, the temporal distance and the valence of envisioned events, may
affect its content as well as its characteristics. Two studies involving healthy
participants of different ages as well as amnesic patients investigate the contribution
of long-term memory to scene construction processes. The results provide evidence
supporting the hypothesis that a common underlying memory-related factor, the
capacity to construct a rich narrative, can influence the descriptions of a-temporal,
future and current scenes alike. The third issue concerns the relationship between
episodic future simulation and prospective memory. Five experiments with young
healthy participants show that mentally pre-experiencing future contingencies
associated to an intended action aids prospective remembering, over and above deep
encoding processing. Overall, the results of the experiments discussed in the present
thesis strengthen the view of prospection as a complex process, which, far from
being encapsulated in a single cognitive function, impinges upon a constellation of
constituent abilities, which may be adaptively used to anticipate and guide future
behaviour.
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