and other goal-directed processes

Placing the future center stage as a way of understanding the function of various cognitive processes is a theoretical position that is gaining in interest and its origins can be traced to work on foresight in the 60s (Stark, 1966) and 70s (Fischhoff, 1975). In fact, some might say that prospection was at the heart of cybernetics, and so its origins lie in work dating back to the 40s (Wiener, 1948). This work described systems (e.g., biological systems, ecologies, societies, economies, industrial power plants, banking systems, transport networks) that operate according to feedback and feed-forward loops. Consider the analogy of our cir-culatory system in which blood is the vehicle for carrying oxygen around the body. Essentially, the claim cyberneticists weremaking was that any self-regulating system involves information traveling through it in a manner that helps to reach and maintain the goals of the system (e.g., homeostasis). To achieve this, the system ha