Abstract Deep recurrent neural networks have achieved impressive success in forecasting human motion with a sequence to sequence architecture. However, forecasting in longer time horizons often leads to implausible human poses or converges to mean poses, because of error accumulation and difficulties in keeping track of longerterm information. To address these challenges, we propose to retrospect human dynamics with attention. A retrospection module is designed upon RNN to regularly retrospect past frames and correct mistakes in time. This significantly improves the memory of RNN and provides sufficient information for the decoder networks to generate longer term prediction. Moreover, we present a spatial attention module to explore and exploit cooperation among joints in performing a particular motion. Residual connections are also included to guarantee the performance of short term prediction. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the largest and most challenging Human 3.6M dataset in the field. Experimental results demonstrate the necessity of investigating motion prediction in a self audit manner and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in both short term and long term predictions