Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic AbstractHumans frequently engage in mental time travel, reflecting on the past and anticipating the future. Although these processes may seem similar, research documents systematic differences between retrospection and prospection. We propose a conceptual framework to organize and explain these differences based on three axiomatic temporal asymmetries: The past occurs before the future; the past is more certain than the future; and the past is less controllable than the future. People's experience with these axiomatic differences is internalized and overgeneralized to shape mental representations of the past and future. Our review shows that people generally prioritize prospection over retrospection, attending more to the future than the past and reacting more intensely to future events than to past events. We consider potential moderators of and constraints on the generality of prioritizing prospection. We explore the implications of these temporal asymmetries, emphasizing their theoretical and practical significance.Public AbstractWhile daily life centers on the present, people often reflect on the past and anticipate the future. But which direction of mental time travel-backward or forward-has more influence? We identify three key differences that shape how people engage with the past and future: time flows from past to future, the future is more uncertain, and people have more control over the future. These differences affect the frequency, intensity, and nature of thoughts and feelings, leading to predictable biases in how we mentally represent and emotionally engage with events over time. Because focusing on the future often provides greater benefits, people tend to prioritize prospection over retrospection in everyday life.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".