practice is essential not only for elite performance but also in the acquirement of numerous everyday feats. Flexible decision-making Intertemporal choices are choices with outcomes that play out over time. Such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life, ranging from routine decisions about what to eat for lunch (i.e. whether to adhere to a diet) to more profound decisions about climate change (i.e. whether to reduce current energy expenditure to avoid delayed costs). The ability to imagine future scenarios and adjust decisions accordingly may be important for making intertemporal choices in a flexible manner that accords with delayed consequences. Accumulating evidence suggests that cuing people to imagine the future in vivid detail can encourage preferences for delayed outcomes over immediate ones. This has been extended into real-world decisions such as in reducing the consumption of high-calorie food and increasing pro-environmental behaviours. Clinical impairment In recent years there have been a range of investigations into variation in prospection and its functions in clinical populations. Deficits to the mechanisms and functions of prospection have been observed in Alzheimer's disease and other age-related dementias, Schizophrenia, and after brain damage (especially to the medial temporal lobes). Shifts in the content and modes of prospection have been observed in affective disorders. For example, in both clinical depression and anxiety there is an overrepresentation of possible negative future events. In depression, there is additionally a reduction in the generation of possible positive future events. There are also a range of changes to the representational format (i.e. whether people tend to represent the future in episodic or semantic detail) in affective disorders. See also Constructivism (psychological school) Foresight (psychology) Future orientation Future-oriented therapy Futures techniques Goal orientation Goal setting Mental time travel References External links Cognitive psychology Prediction