The measurement of episodic foresight: A systematic review of assessment instruments

Prospection, or thinking about the future, is currently a topic of significant interdisciplinary research interest. Episodic foresight is considered a complex form of prospection that enables people to generate mental models of future scenarios with which to guide actions. In this article, we systematically review the available episodic foresight measurement instruments. PubMed and PsycInfo were searched through July, 2017 and manual searches of published reviews and snowball searches of included studies were also performed. The initial search yielded 970 records after the removal of duplicates, of which 363 underwent full-text screening. Studies that did not measure the imagination of future scenarios in adult humans, or that were not reported in English, were excluded. The review consists of 303 articles classified into two broad categories, content measures and generation measures, that were further subdivided into one or more of six subcategories: (i) phenomenology (60%); (ii) examination (49%); (iii) fluency (12%); (iii) reaction time (12%); sentence completion (5%); and thought sampling (2%). We catalogue the available instruments in these sections, and provide a summary overview of each category. Following phenomenological measures, the adapted Autobiographical Interview and measures of specificity were the most frequently used instruments. We conclude that none of the available instruments have been appropriately validated for use, and therefore suggest caution with the use of any of the included measures. The development of behavioural measures designed to capture degrees of episodic foresight ability in functionally relevant contexts among humans would provide a major advance over the currently available instruments.