Mental simulation of the approximal future: Imagining what might happen next.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the course of daily life, various events-such as driving in suboptimal weather conditions, going on a first date, or walking home alone at night-evoke cognitions about what might happen next in the context of ongoing experience. Nonetheless, little is currently known about the phenomenological experience of anticipating events that might occur next-or what we refer to as simulation of the approximal future. We present novel evidence from a retrospective survey, a diary study, and an experimental laboratory study indicating that people commonly experience simulations of the approximal future, and that simulations of the approximal future can be reliably distinguished, in terms of their valence and function, from simulations of future events that are expected to occur in spatiotemporal contexts that are distinct from ongoing experience. Simulation of the approximal future represents an understudied mental experience that carries important implications for understanding the nature of constructive perceptual and memory-based processes as they pertain to event cognition, threat detection, individual differences, and psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".