Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel and Self-Reinforcement

Future-oriented mental time travel is a highly adaptive cognitive behavior that makes everyday life much more predictable, rewarding, and successful. It can protect people from potential harm and facilitate coping with social and professional challenges. However, it is not yet fully understood in which respect people who act proactively or with foresight differ from those who tend not to plan ahead and obviously prefer rather spontaneous solutions. In an attempt to explain such interindividual differences, the self-reinforcement hypothesis of future-oriented mental time travel, which is based on behaviorist learning theory, is presented. Possible neurophysiological substrates underlying this mechanism are discussed, and experimental proof of concept approaches are proposed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).