On Future Thinking: Specificity, Reasoning and Schemas

Future-directed thinking can take a variety of forms, yet contemporary research emphasizes the imagination of episodic future events, and a reduced capacity for generating specific events is often pathologized. In this paper, we first reflect on the concept of specificity, including how it has been operationalized, the factors influencing the generation of specific future events, and the adaptive benefits of non-episodic thinking. Second, we highlight a new perspective on the neurocognitive underpinnings of future thinking that focuses on higher-order executive abilities such as relational reasoning and schematic processing. We argue that these abilities are crucial to the flexible thinking required to create new schemas that move one’s future thinking beyond the status quo. We consider the implications of these ideas for understanding alterations of future thinking in depression.