[4][5] Associative learning enables individual animals to track local regularities in their environments and adapt their behaviour accordingly, in order to maximise their chances of positive outcomes and minimise risks.
Animals that are capable of positive and negative states (for example pleasure and pain) can eventually learn about the consequences of their actions and thereby predict imminent rewards and punishments before they occur.
To acquire new knowledge or additional skills, people therefore engage in repeated actions driven by the goal to improve these future capacities.
Accumulating evidence suggests that cuing people to imagine the future in vivid detail can encourage preferences for delayed outcomes over immediate ones.
Deficits to the mechanisms and functions of prospection have been observed in Alzheimer's disease and other age-related dementias,[16] Schizophrenia, and after brain damage (especially to the medial temporal lobes).
There are also a range of changes to the representational format (i.e. whether people tend to represent the future in episodic or semantic detail) in affective disorders.