Anticipatory Activity Research Articles

Forecasting, thresholds, and triggers: Towards developing a Forecast-based Financing system for droughts in Mozambique

To support Mozambique in the mitigation and management of droughts, the World Food Programme (WFP) is seeking to implement innovative approaches to protect people’s livelihood who face drought risk. The approach that has potential of closing the humanitarian funding gap is Forecast-based Financing (FbF). FbF enables anticipatory actions against droughts using seasonal forecasts, which are implemented to reduce impacts in the critical window between a forecast and an event. An important step for leveraging seasonal forecasting information to implement FbF is the development of an operational trigger system for drought anticipatory action. Our study describes WFP’s FbF system for droughts being tested in Mozambique using the ECMWF 7-month rainfall ensemble forecast. We showed that the forecasting information has skill to detect most of the drought events, measured by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) with lead time varying from 6 to 1 month. We observed that information of different lead times produces a marginal improvement on the average skill of the predictions. After deriving probability values that can trigger anticipatory action, we found that the overall system yields a mean Hit Rate and False Alarm Ratio of 74 % and 59 %, respectively. However, there are opportunities for reducing the false alarm ratio and increasing the hit rate when focusing on key specific lead times. We believe that implementing FbF against droughts based on forecast information can help humanitarian organizations to reduce losses to livelihoods and cost of humanitarian operations while supporting communities in a more dignified manner.

Forecast-based action for conservation.

Extreme weather events pose an immediate threat to biodiversity, but existing conservation strategies have limitations. Advances in meteorological forecasting and innovation in the humanitarian sector provide a possible solution-forecast-based action (FbA). The growth of ecological forecasting demonstrates the huge potential to anticipate conservation outcomes, but a lack of operational examples suggests a new approach is needed to translate forecasts into action. FbA provides such a framework, formalizing the use of meteorological forecasts to anticipate and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather. Based on experience from the humanitarian sector, I suggest how FbA could work in conservation, demonstrating key concepts using the theoretical example of heatwave impacts on sea turtle embryo mortality, and address likely challenges in realizing FbA for conservation, including establishing a financing mechanism, allocating funds to actions, and decision-making under uncertainty. FbA will demand changes in conservation research, practice, and governance. Researchers must increase efforts to understand the impacts of extreme weather at more immediate and actionable timescales and should coproduce forecasts of such impacts with practitioners. International conservation funders should establish systems to fund anticipatory actions based on uncertain forecasts.

Using anticipation to unveil drivers of local livelihoods in Transfrontier Conservation Areas: A call for more environmental justice

AbstractCalling on the concept of environmental justice in its distributive, procedural and recognition dimensions, we implemented a coelaborative scenario building approach to explore sustainable livelihoods pathways in four sites belonging to two Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa.Grounded on participation and transdisciplinarity, as a foundation for decolonised anticipatory action research, we aimed at stimulating knowledge exchange and providing insights on the future of local livelihoods engaging experts living within these TFCAs.Our results show that wildlife and wildlife‐related activities are not seen as the primary drivers of local livelihoods, despite the focus and investments of dominant stakeholders in these sectors. Instead, local governance and land use regulations emerged as key drivers in the four study sites. The state of natural resources, including water, and appropriate farming systems also appeared critical to sustain future livelihoods in TFCAs, together with the recognition of indigenous culture, knowledge and value systems.Nature conservation, especially in Africa, is rooted in its colonial past and struggles to free or decolonise itself from the habits of this past despite decades of reconsideration. To date, the enduring coloniality of conservation prevents local citizens from truly participating in the planning and designing of the TFCAs they live in, leaving room for limited benefits to local citizens and often limiting Indigenous people's capacity to conserve.A practical way forward is to consider environmental justice as a cement between the two pillars of the TFCA concept, that is, nature conservation and socio‐economic development of local or neighbouring communities, as part of a more broadly and urgent need to rethink the relationships between people in, and with, the rest of nature.Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

Towards Posture and Gait Evaluation through Wearable-Based Biofeedback Technologies

In medicine and sport science, postural evaluation is an essential part of gait and posture correction. There are various instruments for quantifying the postural system’s efficiency and determining postural stability which are considered state-of-the-art. However, such systems present many limitations related to accessibility, economic cost, size, intrusiveness, usability, and time-consuming set-up. To mitigate these limitations, this project aims to verify how wearable devices can be assembled and employed to provide feedback to human subjects for gait and posture improvement, which could be applied for sports performance or motor impairment rehabilitation (from neurodegenerative diseases, aging, or injuries). The project is divided into three parts: the first part provides experimental protocols for studying action anticipation and related processes involved in controlling posture and gait based on state-of-the-art instrumentation. The second part provides a biofeedback strategy for these measures concerning the design of a low-cost wearable system. Finally, the third provides algorithmic processing of the biofeedback to customize the feedback based on performance conditions, including individual variability. Here, we provide a detailed experimental design that distinguishes significant postural indicators through a conjunct architecture that integrates state-of-the-art postural and gait control instrumentation and a data collection and analysis framework based on low-cost devices and freely accessible machine learning techniques. Preliminary results on 12 subjects showed that the proposed methodology accurately recognized the phases of the defined motor tasks (i.e., rotate, in position, APAs, drop, and recover) with overall F1-scores of 89.6% and 92.4%, respectively, concerning subject-independent and subject-dependent testing setups.

Anticipatory action to manage climate risks: Lessons from the Red Cross Red Crescent in Southern Africa, Bangladesh, and beyond

Anticipatory action (AA) is a growing area of climate and disaster risk management that emphasizes the use of climate services and risk analyses to predict where crises might strike and enable action to prevent or mitigate impacts before disasters occur. Based on interviews with stakeholders involved in Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) AA programs in 18 countries, we identify common benefits and challenges associated with AA programs. We find that RCRC AA programs have built capacity within National Societies, leading to more proactive operations and expedited humanitarian response. Initial investments in AA can also develop key partnerships and facilitate later scaling-up by other organizations. AA can also overcome common challenges in climate services by providing a framework and decision-making and resources for early action. Despite these benefits, AA practitioners struggle with challenges common to climate services, development, and humanitarian aid, including local project ownership, capacity and infrastructure, integration with existing systems, data availability, forecast uncertainty, and monitoring and evaluation. Given these challenges, we reflect on how AA might be able to address challenges of ownership and capacity building and what donors can do to facilitate shifts toward longer-term capacity building.

The duration of caffeine treatment plays an essential role in its effect on sleep and circadian rhythm.

Sleep is regulated by the homeostatic system and the circadian clock. Caffeine intake promotes wakefulness in Drosophila. In humans, caffeine is consumed on a daily basis and hence it is important to understand the effect of prolonged caffeine intake on both circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep. Furthermore, sleep changes with age and the impact of caffeine on age-dependent sleep fragmentation are yet to be understood. Hence in the present study, we examined the effect of short exposure to caffeine on homeostatic sleep and age-dependent sleep fragmentation in Drosophila. We further assessed the effect of prolonged exposure to caffeine on homeostatic sleep and circadian clock. The results of our study showed that short exposure to caffeine reduces sleep and food intake in mature flies. It also enhances sleep fragmentation with increasing age. However, we have not assessed the effect of caffeine on food intake in older flies. On the other hand, prolonged caffeine exposure did not exert any significant effect on the duration of sleep and food intake in mature flies. Nevertheless, prolonged caffeine ingestion decreased the morning and evening anticipatory activity in these flies indicating that it affects the circadian rhythm. These flies also exhibited phase delay in the clock gene timeless transcript oscillation and exhibited either behavioral arrhythmicity or a longer free-running period under constant darkness. In summary, the results of our studies showed that short exposure to caffeine increases the sleep fragmentation with age whereas prolonged caffeine exposure disrupts the circadian clock.

Earth observation as a tool to assess climate migration and policy-making: Legal aspects

The impact of climate change on the biosphere and atmosphere is well documented but its impact on the anthroposphere needs to be better understood. Indeed, divergent views remain both at the regional level -as shown by (i) the EU case-by-case approach (ii) the African Kampala Convention (2009) and (iii) the Latin-American Lineamientos regionales (2018)- and finally the international one. As the Paris Agreement (2015) urges States to use best available scientific knowledge to counter the negative effects of climate change, we argue that Earth Observation (EO) could be potentially exploited by policy-makers as an efficient platform for modeling, forecasting, characterizing and understanding the severity of migration flows, contributing to evidence-based Anticipatory Action (A-A) for the effective management of climate migration, and setting the direction for future policies in this field that would be equitable on both regional and international scales. Hence, in implementing the Paris Agreement, States should increase the funding and use of EO and Causality as policy-supporting tools, to reduce the need for reactive and costly responses to displacement, and promote the safety, dignity, and well-being of people affected by climate change. However, based on said input, a well-adapted framework for the legal protection of climate migrants should be adopted.

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ МЕНТАЛЬНЫХ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЙ: НОВЫЙ ПОДХОД К ОБЪЯСНЕНИЮ ПРИРОДЫ АНТИЦИПАЦИОННОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ

The systemic functional-regulatory approach played a big role in identifying the general patterns of anticipatory activity and in recognizing anticipation as one of the basic properties of the psyche. From this point of view, the concept of A.A. Ukhtomsky about the integral image, which is an integral part of his doctrine of the dominant as the main system-forming principle of the organization of human behavior and psycheб is of particular interest. The integral image, as a product of the dominant, acts as a kind of anticipatory scheme that predetermines the vector and nature of future activity. The dynamic development of the integral image can be represented as a series of successive and hierarchically organized levels of mental transformation. Ukhtomsky's concept for the first time provides a holistic platform for explaining the nature of anticipating activity and those systemic cognitive deficits that occur in developmental disorders. In this case, the dominant need acts as the main condition for the transition of a sensory image as a certain generalized representation from a potential formation into an active component of the formation of anticipatory schemes of behavior. Created on the basis of a synthesis of natural science and humanities knowledge about human nature, the concept of an integral image is an example of a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the problems of studying the basic foundations of human mental activity and can currently act as a new paradigm in the study of anticipation problems.

Impacts of a ‘Double Disaster’ on Small-Scale Grouper Farmers in the Bicol Region, Philippines

The series of devastating typhoons during the COVID-19 pandemic was a remarkable event in the Philippines’ history of natural disasters. This case study documented the impacts of the two overlapping shock events on the livelihood of small-scale grouper farmers in the towns of Ragay and Del Gallego, Camarines Sur, Philippines, while reflecting on their coping strategies and social support. The findings revealed that the typhoons induced additional pressure on the well-being of the farmers while they were still dealing with the negative impacts of the pandemic. The contributing aspects to their livelihood vulnerability were attributed to their limited adaptive capacity to withstand various shocks and the susceptibility of their farm sites to repeated natural hazards. The study also identified different coping strategies the farmers undertook, including the roles of social support, in dealing with the impacts of these shocks. Establishing anticipatory action protocols is necessary to manage the long-term impact of repeated shocks to strengthen their livelihood and household resilience.

A Complete Meteo/Hydro/Hydraulic Chain Application to Support Early Warning and Monitoring Systems: The Apollo Medicane Use Case

Because of the ongoing changing climate, extreme rainfall events’ frequency at the global scale is expected to increase, thus resulting in high social and economic impacts. A Meteo/Hydro/Hydraulic forecasting chain combining heterogeneous observational data sources is a crucial component for an Early Warning System and is a fundamental asset for Civil Protection Authorities to correctly predict these events, their effects, and put in place anticipatory actions. During the last week of October 2021 an intense Mediterranean hurricane (Apollo) affected many Mediterranean countries (Tunisia, Algeria, Malta, and Italy) with a death toll of seven people. The CIMA Meteo/Hydro/Hydraulic forecasting chain, including the WRF model, the hydrological model Continuum, the automatic system for water detection (AUTOWADE), and the hydraulic model TELEMAC-2D, was operated in real-time to predict the Apollo weather evolution as well as its hydrological and hydraulic impacts, in support of the early warning activities of the Italian Civil Protection Department. The WRF model assimilating radar data and in situ weather stations showed very good predictive capability for rainfall timing and location over eastern Sicily, thus supporting accurate river flow peak forecasting with the hydrological model Continuum. Based on WRF predictions, the daily automatic system for water detection (AUTOWADE) run using Sentinel 1 data was anticipated with respect to the scheduled timing to quickly produce a flood monitoring map. Ad hoc tasking of the COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation was also performed to overcome the S1 data latency in eastern Sicily. The resulting automated operational mapping of floods and inland waters was integrated with the subsequent execution of the hydraulic model TELEMAC-2D to have a complete representation of the flooded area with water depth and water velocity.

Anticipatory action: Lessons for the future

Climate shocks are causing increasingly severe damage and amplifying humanitarian needs. So far, humanitarian action has been mostly responsive, arriving after a crisis has materialized. With recent advances in forecasting, humanitarian and development organizations have been able to anticipate and respond ahead of crises. “Anticipatory action” (AA) seeks to ensure aid is provided before the peak impact of a shock occurs, reducing suffering and humanitarian needs. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has been developing AA frameworks since 2019, coordinating collective AA and mobilizing finance. To date, these pilots have reached approximately 2.2 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. In six countries (Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Nepal, Niger, and The Philippines), frameworks are in place to reach a further 2.3 million people should the triggers be reached. OCHA is facilitating the design of AA plans in Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Madagascar, Mozambique and South Sudan. We share lessons from the pilots, focusing on three components: triggers, programming, and financing. We report that triggers must be sufficiently reliable to warrant action and funds disbursement. Forecasts are not available for all countries or hazards, and existing forecasts may not provide desired resolution or skill (accuracy) levels, especially at longer lead times. The timing of action therefore must balance forecast skill against operational needs. Funding is best when it is flexible and includes finance for framework design, evaluation and continued improvements. Finally we discuss the challenges and opportunities in scaling up AA.

Failure Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises in the New Public Management Perspective: A Case Study of PT. Garuda Indonesia Tbk

This article aims to describe the failure of financial performance from the perspective of New Public Management (NPM) which caused the bankruptcy of the company PT. Garuda Indonesia Tbk. The problem in this research is focused on the financial performance of PT. Garuda Indonesia Tbk failed due to its weakness in increasing effectiveness and efficiency as well as controlling output and outcome in using the resources owned by the company. In order to approach this problem, New Public Management (NPM) theory as a reference is based on seven NPM concepts. The data in this study were collected through literature review from various sources, such as journals, news, and official company documents. This research was conducted using qualitative research methods with a descriptive approach. This study concludes that the bankruptcy of PT. Garuda Indonesia Tbk is caused by several factors, namely control of output and outcome, less than optimal allocation of organizational resources, actions that focus on inputs without paying attention to outputs, and the lack of adaptation and anticipatory actions in the organizational environment.

Dorsal striatum coding for the timely execution of action sequences.

The automatic initiation of actions can be highly functional. But occasionally these actions cannot be withheld and are released at inappropriate times, impulsively. Striatal activity has been shown to participate in the timing of action sequence initiation and it has been linked to impulsivity. Using a self-initiated task, we trained adult male rats to withhold a rewarded action sequence until a waiting time interval has elapsed. By analyzing neuronal activity we show that the striatal response preceding the initiation of the learned sequence is strongly modulated by the time subjects wait before eliciting the sequence. Interestingly, the modulation is steeper in adolescent rats, which show a strong prevalence of impulsive responses compared to adults. We hypothesize this anticipatory striatal activity reflects the animals' subjective reward expectation, based on the elapsed waiting time, while the steeper waiting modulation in adolescence reflects age-related differences in temporal discounting, internal urgency states, or explore-exploit balance.

‘Forced to Become a Community’: Encampment Residents’ Perspectives on Systemic Failures, Precarity, and Constrained Choice

Homelessness is a serious public health concern with devastating consequences for health and wellbeing of homeless people. Visible signs of homelessness often appear in the form of encampments or tent cities. Such sites often raise controversies about public health and safety without attention to the structural, systemic and individual factors that contribute to their existence, including deficits in basic determinants of health and a failure to protect human rights to housing. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions that contribute to homeless encampments and ongoing issues of precarity, and right to housing from the perspective of residents of one encampment. The data set was comprised of 47 affidavits taken from 33 people from one tent city in Victoria, British Columbia (BC) in anticipation of legal action to remove residents and their belongings in 2016. We used Braun and Clarke’s (2006) approach to thematic analysis to identify, analyze and report patterns within the data. Residents spoke to systemic failures within the homeless sector itself as a factor in decisions to live in an encampment. Participants highlighted the challenges of ‘being chained to a backpack’ with nowhere to go and the impact of bylaws and policing on their health and well being. They acknowledged that while living in an encampment is a last resort it is often a better option than the streets or shelters with the benefits of a community, albeit a forced one with ongoing precarity. Public health responses to encampments should focus on centring human rights to adequate housing including self-determination and access to determinants of health. Such responses are aligned with public health commitments to health equity and social justice and require public health infrastructure.

Emerging Self-Representation Presents a Challenge When Perspectives Conflict.

The capacity to take another's perspective appears to be present from early in life, with young infants ostensibly able to predict others' behaviour even when the self and other perspective are at odds. Yet, infants' abilities are difficult to reconcile with the well-known problems that older children have with ignoring their own perspective. Here we show that it is the development of the self-perspective, at around 18 months, that creates a perspective conflict between self and other during a non-verbal perspective-tracking scenario. Using mirror self-recognition as a measure of self-awareness and pupil dilation to index conflict processing, our results show that mirror recognisers perceive greater conflict during action anticipation, specifically in a high inhibitory demand condition, in which conflict between self and other should be particularly salient.

Action experience in infancy predicts visual-motor functional connectivity during action anticipation.

Despite substantial evidence indicating a close link between action production and perception in early child development, less is known about how action experience shapes the processes of perceiving and anticipating others' actions. Here, we developed a novel approach to capture functional connectivity specific to certain brain areas to investigate how action experience changes the networks involved in action perception and anticipation. Nine- and-12-month-old infants observed familiar (grasping) and novel (tool-use) actions while their brain activity was measured using EEG. Infants' motor competence of both actions was assessed. A link between action experience and connectivity patterns was found, particularly during the anticipation period. During action anticipation, greater motor competence in grasping predicted greater functional connectivity between visual (occipital alpha) and motor (central alpha) regions relative to global levels of whole-brain EEG connectivity. Furthermore, visual and motor regions tended to be more coordinated in response to familiar versus novel actions and for older than younger participants. Critically, these effects were not found in the control networks (frontal-central; frontal-occipital; parietal-central; parietal-occipital), suggesting a unique role of visual-motor networks on the link between motor skills and action encoding. HIGHLIGHTS: Infants' motor development predicted functional connectivity patterns during action anticipation. Faster graspers, and older infants, showed a stronger ratio of visual-motor neural coherence. Overall whole-brain connectivity was modulated by age and familiarity with the actions. Measuring inter-site relative to whole-brain connectivity can capture specific brain-behavior links. Measures of phase-based connectivity over time are sensitive to anticipatory action.

Predictive motor activation: Modulated by expectancy or predictability?

Predicting actions is a fundamental ability that helps us to comprehend what is happening in our environment and to interact with others. The motor system was previously identified as source of action predictions. Yet, which aspect of the statistical likelihood of upcoming actions the motor system is sensitive to remains an open question. This EEG study investigated how regularities in observed actions are reflected in the motor system and utilized to predict upcoming actions. Prior to measuring EEG, participants watched videos of action sequences with different transitional probabilities. After training, participants' brain activity over motor areas was measured using EEG while watching videos of action sequences with the same statistical structure. Focusing on the mu and beta frequency bands we tested whether activity of the motor system reflects the statistical likelihood of upcoming actions. We also explored two distinct aspects of the statistical structure that capture different prediction processes, expectancy and predictability. Expectancy describes participants' expectation of the most likely action, whereas predictability represents all possible actions and their relative probabilities. Results revealed that mu and beta oscillations play different roles during action prediction. While the mu rhythm reflected anticipatory activity without any link to the statistical structure, the beta rhythm was related to the expectancy of an action. Our findings support theories proposing that the motor system underlies action prediction, and they extend such theories by showing that multiple forms of statistical information are extracted when observing action sequences. This information is integrated in the prediction generated by the neural motor system of which action is going to happen next.

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy to advance multi-hazard disaster risk management

COVID-19 challenged all national emergency management systems worldwide overlapping with other natural hazards. We framed a ‘parallel phases’ Disaster Risk Management (DRM) model to overcome the limitations of the existing models when dealing with complex multi-hazard risk conditions. We supported the limitations analysing Italian Red Cross data on past and ongoing emergencies including COVID-19 and we outlined three guidelines for advancing multi-hazard DRM: (i) exploiting the low emergency intensity of slow-onset hazards for preparedness actions; (ii) increasing the internal resources and making them available for international support; (iii) implementing multi-hazard seasonal impact-based forecasts to foster the planning of anticipatory actions.

Infants’ Prediction of Humanoid Robot’s Goal-Directed Action

Several studies have shown that infants anticipate human goal-directed actions, but not robot’s ones. However, the studies focusing on the robot goal-directed actions have mainly analyzed the effect of mechanical arms on infant’s attention. To date, the prediction of goal-directed actions in infants has not yet been studied when the agent is a humanoid robot. Given this lack of evidence in infancy research, the present study aims at analyzing infants’ action anticipation of both a human’s and a humanoid robot’s goal-directed action. Data were acquired on thirty 17-month-old infants, watching four video clips, where either a human or a humanoid robot performed a goal-directed action, i.e. reaching a target. Infants looking behavior was measured through the eye-tracking technique. The results showed that infants anticipated the goal-directed action of both the human and the robot and there were no differences in the anticipatory gaze behavior between the two agents. Furthermore, the findings indicated different attentional patterns for the human and the robot, showing a greater attention paid to the robot's face than the human’s face. Overall, the results suggest that 17-month-old infants may infer also humanoid robot’ underlying action goals.

Hippocampal convergence during anticipatory midbrain activation promotes subsequent memory formation

The hippocampus has been a focus of memory research since H.M’s surgery abolished his ability to form new memories, yet its mechanistic role in memory remains debated. Here, we identify a candidate memory mechanism: an anticipatory hippocampal “convergence state”, observed while awaiting valuable information, and which predicts subsequent learning. During fMRI, participants viewed trivia questions eliciting high or low curiosity, followed seconds later by its answer. We reasoned that encoding success requires a confluence of conditions, so that hippocampal states more conducive to memory formation should converge in state space. To operationalize convergence of neural states, we quantified the typicality of multivoxel patterns in the medial temporal lobes during anticipation and encoding of trivia answers. We found that the typicality of anticipatory hippocampal patterns increased during high curiosity. Crucially, anticipatory hippocampal pattern typicality increased with dopaminergic midbrain activation and uniquely accounted for the association between midbrain activation and subsequent recall. We propose that hippocampal convergence states may complete a cascade from motivation and midbrain activation to memory enhancement, and may be a general predictor of memory formation.