Memories of the approximal future: evidence for mental simulations of imminent threat across the lifespan
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers have recently demonstrated that people tend to experience spontaneous mental simulations of what might happen next – i.e., the approximal future – and that such simulations are especially likely to focus on possible negative outcomes in relation to sources of perceived threat in the surrounding environment. The purpose of the two studies (N = 318) reported in this manuscript was to better characterise the generalizability of simulations of the approximal future across the lifespan. Participants were asked to report memories of approximal simulations of the future and to indicate whether the events they reported were triggered by any relevant past experiences. Across both studies, we found consistent evidence that people, irrespective of age, remember simulations of the approximal future that are disproportionately characterised by negative as opposed to positive valence, and that these memories tend to be remembered as being triggered by some relevant personal, vicarious, or media event. These findings suggest that mental simulation and memory work flexibility to support threat detection.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it