Prototypical prospection: future events are more prototypically represented and simulated than past events

The results of four experiments support the hypothesis that mental time travel is more prototypical in the future tense than in the past tense. That is, prospection more than retrospection is grounded in scripts, schemas, stereotypes, and other prototypical mental representations of what people, places, and events are typically like. People reported that events in prospection rather than retrospection were more similar to each other and more similar to a prototypical event (encounters with homeless people in Experiment 1, ordering pizza in Experiment 2). Because prototypes tend to be abstract, people selected higher levels of action identification during prospection than during retrospection (Experiment 3) an effect that was not moderated by distance. Finally, drawings of future vacations that were generated by one sample of people were judged by a different sample of people, who were unaware of the drawings' tense, as more prototypical compared with drawings of past vacations (Experiment 4). Discussion centers on the underlying explanations of prototypical prospection and on the implications of these temporal asymmetries for theories of psychological distance.