Future-minded: the role of prospection in Agency, Control, and other goal-directed processes

Placing the future center stage as a way of understanding thefunction of various cognitive processes is a theoretical positionthat is gaining in interest and its origins can be traced to workon foresight in the 60s (Stark, 1966) and 70s (Fischhoff, 1975).In fact, some might say that prospection was at the heart ofcybernetics, and so its origins lie in work dating back to the40s (Wiener, 1948). This work described systems (e.g., biologicalsystems, ecologies, societies, economies, industrial power plants,banking systems, transport networks) that operate according tofeedbackandfeed-forwardloops.Considertheanalogyofourcir-culatory system in which blood is the vehicle for carrying oxygenaroundthebody.Essentially,theclaimcyberneticistsweremakingwasthatanyself-regulatingsysteminvolvesinformationtravelingthroughitinamannerthathelpstoreachandmaintainthegoalsof the system (e.g., homeostasis). To achieve this, the system hasto be flexible enough to enable some adjustment because infor-mationbeingrepeatedlyfedbackthroughthesystemhastoreflectadaptation and change (e.g., the organism running and thereforerequiring more oxygen than when it is in a restful state). A self-regulating system is also anticipatory, this is because it has to bepreparedforfuturechangesinstateanddifferentdemandsplacedonit,andtoachievethisinformationfedbackthroughthesystemis used to make predictions (feed-forward). Therefore, two com-plementary ways in which information is used to help a systemself-regulate efficiently is to accurately relaying information backinto the system in order for learning to occur, and accurately usethe information relayed in order to adapt to the future. The sameconcepts fundamentally apply to cognition (human and animal),because any learning system requires feedback and feedforwardprocesses, and so prospection, is embedded in all aspects of ourbehavior because we learn to adapt to change, and we can’t dothat without anticipation of the future (Osman, 2010, 2014a).