Scott Cole
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Scott Cole currently serves as Associate Professor in Psychology at York St John University. He has expertise in Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology. After some time teaching in China, he worked as a Rehabilitation Support Worker for the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust, and as an Assistant Neuropsychologist for the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust in Sussex. He completed a PhD in "Cognitive and mnemonic characteristics of Episodic Future Thinking" at the University of Leeds. He spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working at the Centre on Autobiographical Memory in Aarhus, Denmark.
He specialises in the psychology of future thinking (or Episodic Future Thinking). In his research, he has examined how a range of groups imagine specific scenarios which may plausibly happen in the future. He is interested in the cognitive processes required for episodic future thinking.
He joins the Paris IAS in April 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Episodic Future Thinking, Spontaneous Thought, Collective Future Thought, Mental Time Travel, Episodic Memory
How Virtual Reality can be applied to investigate future thinking, from theory to applied questions
Thinking, anticipating, and imagining the future are essential cognitive functions that influence our present decisions and actions. To study future thinking, psychologists have generally asked people to generate plausible future scenarios themselves. However, Virtual Reality (VR) has only recently been adopted and can be used to examine how immersive 3D scenarios can influence thought and emotion. This project exploree new directions in future thinking research - specially, how negative and positive versions of a collective future (in VR) can affect thought and perhaps change the way we think about the future.
Key publications
Cole, S. N., Markostamou, I., Watson, L. A., Barzykowski, K., Ergen, İ., Taylor, A., & Öner, S. "Spontaneous past and future thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic across 14 countries: Effects of individual and country-level COVID-19 impact indicators". Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(4), 502–512, 2023.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000071
Cole, S. N & Kvavilashvili, L. "Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: a dual process account". Psychological Research, 85(2), 464-479, 2021.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7
Cole, S. N. & Berntsen, D. "Do Future Thoughts Reflect Personal Goals? Current Concerns and Mental Time Travel into the Past and Future". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 273-284, 2016.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1044542
 Online conference by Scott Cole, Associate Professor in Psychology at York St John University, as part of the "Paris IAS Ideas" series |
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