Key research themes
1. How do cognitive and social mechanisms shape human prospective thinking about the future?
This theme explores the psychological and collective cognitive processes enabling humans to imagine, plan, and simulate possible future events. It addresses the nature of prospection as a guiding behavior, distinguishing constructive and spontaneous future thoughts, and examines collective dimensions of future thought including how groups project themselves forward. The understanding of these mechanisms matters because prospection informs decision-making, motivation, and social collaboration, and links past memory with future anticipation.
2. What are the phenomenological and philosophical foundations of experiencing time and future temporality?
This theme investigates how humans experience time and the future on a phenomenological, metaphysical, and philosophical level. It includes discussions of temporal consciousness, the nature of temporal reality and tense, and the subjective sense of futurity. Exploring these concepts is fundamental to understanding how temporal experience informs cognition, decision-making, and metaphysical theorizing about reality.
3. How do narratives, material culture, and metaphor shape human imagination and conceptualization of future possibilities?
This theme focuses on the role of narrative forms, physical artifacts, and linguistic/metaphorical structures in constructing and mediating human conceptions of the future. Research addresses how imagined futures are expressed, shared, and internalized socially and culturally, as well as how the future is materially embodied and oriented toward through narrative and imagination. These insights illuminate how futures are socially co-created and materially inscribed, impacting identity and action.