Anticipatory Mode Research Articles

Children with developmental coordination disorder display atypical interhemispheric connectivity during conscious and subconscious rhythmic auditory-motor synchronization

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) display difficulties in perception-action coupling when engaging in tasks requiring predictive timing. We investigated the influence of awareness on auditory-motor adjustments to small and large rhythmic perturbations in the auditory sequence to examine whether children synchronize their movements automatically or through planning and whether those adjustments occur consciously or subconsciously. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to assess functional connectivity patterns underlying different adjustment strategies. Thirty-two children aged 7–11 participated, including children with DCD and their typically developing (TD) peers with and without musical training. All children automatically adjusted their motor responses to small rhythmic perturbations by employing the anticipatory mode, even when those changes were consciously undetectable. Planned adjustments occurred only when children consciously detected large fluctuations (Δ 20%), which required a shift from predictive to reactive strategies. Compared to TD peers, children with DCD showed reduced interhemispheric connectivity during planned adjustments and displayed similar neural patterns regardless of task constraints. Notably, they benefited from rhythmic entrainment despite having increased variability and lower perceptual acuity. Musical training was associated with enhanced auditory-perceptual timing, reduced variability, and increased interhemispheric coherence. These insights are important for the therapeutic application of auditory/rhythm-based interventions in children with DCD.

Future notification: Living and breathing in post-pandemic climate change

In a post-pandemic context, everyday life, technology and media have become increasingly focused in the home. This has implications for how people will live with automated and smart technologies in possible futures, for electricity demand, transition to net zero emissions and ultimately planetary health. Here, we explore these unfolding circumstances through the prism of notifications, and their capacity to mediate uncertainties while enabling people to engage in anticipatory modes of home organisation which ensure their physical comfort and produce a sense of ontological security in pandemic and climate crisis situations. In possible futures, the notification may vary from its current characteristics, but would enable people to engage with everyday automated technologies and systems in ways that acknowledge values of place, safety and care.

Problematising the emergence of outbreak science in the governance of global health: making time for slow dis-ease

ABSTRACT There is growing investment in the development of new methods, networks, and infrastructures of knowledge coordination to prepare for disease threats to come. ‘Outbreak science’ is an emerging field that proposes to improve epidemic preparedness and precautionary response. But what are the effects of framing and governing ‘outbreaks’ in this anticipatory mode? What ways of knowing and doing preparedness and response does outbreak science open up and foreclose through its promise of fast, actionable information in situations of uncertainty? We consider how ‘outbreak’ is made governable through its evidencing, with profound, and unevenly distributed, social and material repercussions. We focus on one problematisation intrinsic to outbreak science, that is, the need for speed. Drawing on work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) on pollutants and the slow burn of environmental harms, we argue that constituting ‘outbreak’ as a problem to be managed with immediacy and speed obscures the long-enduring temporalities and complex ecological relations of disease. We suggest ‘slow dis-ease’ in conjunction with ‘perpetual care’ as alternative modes of problematising outbreak. There is a practical difference made possible by making time for slow dis-ease, a time that is currently lost by the rapid, anticipation and short-term event focus of outbreak science.

“There Existed an Addiction to Blood”: Exhuming the Transtemporal Body

In light of burgeoning mainstream and commercial interest in black horror, futurism, and surrealism in recent film and television, this article sets out to redress the relegation of the black vampire to the shadows of culture, both to illume its aesthetic and narrative innovations and to address the radical alterity and political potency of its speculative mythology with regard to time and the body. I approach the undead black body as a rhizomatic through line that collapses axiomatic temporal dimensions of past, present, and future into a coexistent, thickened, layered moment, and thus simultaneously reflects revisionist, alternate, and anticipatory modes of imagining resistant and revolutionary possibilities. Found lurking throughout black creative production, the black vampire offers a transmedial line of flight, a revolutionary revision of dominant practice that augments the black body, so consistently deprived of life throughout history and art, with immortality and a timeless point of view.

Writing styles and modes of engagement with the future

This paper present a new approach to analyze how people anticipate the future in times of uncertainty. Our approach combines insights from narrative theory and the sociology of anticipatory modes of engagement with the future. We applied a mixed method approach to analyze 166 letters from a creative writing exercise where residents from five countries was asked to write retrospectively from the viewpoint of a desired post-corona future. Using the methodology of Digital Story Grammar, we first categorized the letters given their grammatical structure in terms of who are in stories (characters), what the stories are about (type of action), and to what or whom were the actions directed to (objects for the character’s actions). This resulted in four writing styles: (1) analytical-observational, (2) collective-moral, (3) dialogical-personal, and (4) sensory-emotional. Consequently, we interpreted the four writing styles qualitatively in relation to the theory of modes of engagement with the future (i.e., familiarity, plans, exploration, and justification). We conclude by reflecting on the relationships between writing styles and modes in a multi-paradigmatic approach to the study of anticipation and the relevance to scenario-building practices.

Visual cues two-steps ahead are adequate to grasp an object while walking without compromising stability.

In our prior studies, participants walked and grasped a dowel using an anticipatory mode of control. However, it is unknown how this combined task would change in a less predictable environment. We investigated the online control aspects involved in the combined task of walking and grasping under different coordination patterns between upper- and lower-limbs in young adults. Fifteen young adults walked and grasped a dowel under several experimental conditions combining the instant of visual cue appearance and coordination pattern of upper and lower limbs used to grasp the dowel. Visual cues provided two steps ahead or earlier were enough for executing the combined task of walking and prehension appropriately. Visual cues provided within this window impacted both walking stability and the execution of the prehension movement. Although an ipsilateral arm-leg coordination pattern increased mediolateral stability, a contralateral pattern significantly decreased mediolateral center of mass stability when the visual cue appeared one-step before grasping the object. These results imply that acquiring information to plan the combined task of walking and reaching for an object two steps ahead allows the maintenance of the general movement characteristics present when the decision to reach out for the object is defined two or more steps ahead. These results indicate that the prehension movement is initiated well before heel contact on that side when given sufficient planning time, but that a disruption of the natural arm-leg coordination dynamics emerges to accomplish the task when the cue is provided one step before the object.

Brand of Brothers?

This article explores two modes of innocence at work in the making of the Humboldt Forum, Germany’s biggest cultural project. It examines the legacy of the historical castle’s “cabinet of curiosities” and the elevation of the Humboldt brothers, especially Alexander von Humboldt, to patron saints. Through these cases, the article identifies an exculpatory mode of innocence focused on the past and an anticipatory mode focused on the future. These modes, it argues, exemplify a tension between the imagination of history as a timeless realm that eschews redemption and as fungible materials that can be recombined to start anew and redeem the past.

What Counts as “Success” in Speculative and Anticipatory Ethics? Lessons from the Advent of Germline Gene Editing

This discussion note offers a preliminary analysis of what recent developments in human germline gene editing tell us about the effectiveness of speculative and anticipatory modes of techno-ethics. It argues that the benefits of speculative discussions are difficult to detect thus far, and that pushing the focal point of ethical discourse well ahead of the current state of technology may prematurely undermine existing norms long before a broad consensus would justify moving beyond them.

Multi-scale integrated evaluation of the sustainability of large-scale use of alternative feeds in salmon aquaculture

The steady increase in production volume of salmon aquaculture has sharpened concerns about its sustainability. In particular the production of salmon feed is a reason for concern given its reliance on scarce natural resources, such as wild fish captures. Multi-scale integrated analysis is put forward as a tool to anticipate the environmental and socio-economic impacts of large-scale implementation of alternative salmon feeds, considering both plant and insect sources as potential replacements of fish meal and fish oil. The proposed accounting framework, based on relational analysis across hierarchical levels, describes the patterns of required inputs using biophysical and economic variables. It also considers the inputs used by external systems for the production of imported feed, thus providing a coherent assessment of the sustainability of the production system in terms of feasibility, viability, and desirability. The analytical tool-kit is illustrated in conceptual terms and then applied to the Norwegian salmon aquaculture, both in diagnostic (describing the actual situation) and anticipatory mode (examining feed scenarios). Results are used in an exercise of quantitative story-telling to check the quality of the narratives currently shaping policy discussions on aquaculture. Quantitative story-telling is a heuristic approach aimed at checking the robustness of knowledge claims in face of uncertainty. It is concluded that rearing insects in the salmon feed production chain enlarges the option space of feed sources by opening up the possibility of using locally-produced seaweed and organic waste, but also raises the level of uncertainty with regard to the possible insurgence of negative side effects.

In Silico Analysis of an Exercise-Safe Artificial Pancreas With Multistage Model Predictive Control and Insulin Safety System.

Maintaining glycemic equilibrium can be challenging for people living with type 1 diabetes (T1D) as many factors (eg, length, type, duration, insulin on board, stress, and training) will impact the metabolic changes triggered by physical activity potentially leading to both hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia. Therefore, and despite the noted health benefits, many individuals with T1D do not exercise as much as their healthy peers. While technology advances have improved glucose control during and immediately after exercise, it remains one of the key limitations of artificial pancreas (AP) systems, largely because stopping insulin at the onset of exercise may not be enough to prevent impending, exercise-induced hypoglycemia. A hybrid AP algorithm with subject-specific exercise behavior recognition and anticipatory action is designed to prevent hypoglycemic events during and after moderate-intensity exercise. Our approach relies on a number of key innovations, namely, an activity informed premeal bolus calculator, personalized exercise pattern recognition, and a multistage model predictive control (MS-MPC) strategy that can transition between reactive and anticipatory modes. This AP design was evaluated on 100 in silico subjects from the most up-to-date FDA-accepted UVA/Padova metabolic simulator, emulating an outpatient clinical trial setting. Results with a baseline controller, a regular MPC (rMPC), are also included for comparison purposes. In silico experiments reveal that the proposed MS-MPC strategy markedly reduces the number of exercise-related hypoglycemic events (8 vs 68). An anticipatory mode for insulin administration of a monohormonal AP controller reduces the occurrence of hypoglycemia during moderate-intensity exercise.

Preparing for a world without markets: legitimising strategies of preppers

ABSTRACT‘Prepping’ – the storing of food, water and weapons as well as the development of self-sufficiency skills for the purpose of independently surviving disasters – is an emerging market as well as an expression of generalised anxiety about existential threats (e.g. technological collapse and catastrophic climate change). Whilst accounts of eccentric prepping are common in mainstream media, there is little empirical investigation into how consumers imagine and prepare for a temporary or permanent halt to functioning market systems, and with it, a consumer society. A netnography of European preppers reveals prepping to be an anticipatory mode of practicing for a post-market, post-consumer society before it becomes a reality. We find that preparation is a struggle for cognitive legitimacy through four different modes: vulnerabilising the market, common-sensing market signals, othering civilian consumers and unblackboxing objects.

Conceptualizing Activation Policies Targeted at Single Mothers: A Case Study of Australia and the United Kingdom

AbstractSingle parents are increasingly a target group for “activation” through new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterize new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as “carers” or “mothers”. This characterization downplays the degree to which the postwar welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the degree to which contemporary reforms view them as carers. Based on historical research and drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power, this article seeks to extend existing characterizations of activation policies for single parents.

Safety feelings and anticipatory control: An fMRI study on safety and risk perception

Car driving as goal-directed behavior is based on anticipations. In everyday driving, most of the time a car is operated in a rather implicit anticipatory mode with little disparity between an anticipated and actual driving result. A disruption of this driving mode goes along with heightened risk perception and changes in somatic states. In an fMRI study, safety and risk perception was investigated in male car drivers with regard to anticipatory control. Neural correlates revealed that perceived safety is accompanied by a higher involvement of primary visual areas, motor areas, the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right hippocampus, right temporo-parietal junction, and in particular – as supported by contrasts with a further condition – of the left parahippocampal gyrus and bilateral precentral gyrus. This indicates stronger retrieval of memory and stored movement programs for impressions of safety, corresponding to an anticipatory mode of driving. Additionally, activation levels in the left ACC were marginally negatively correlated with perceived situational control in risky driving situations. These results highlight the role of anticipatory control in perceived safety on an implicit level relevant for everyday driving.

Engineering imaginaries: Anticipatory foresight for solar radiation management governance.

Since solar radiation management (SRM) technologies do not yet exist and capacities to model their impacts are limited, proposals for its governance are implicitly designed not around realities, but possibilities - baskets of risk and benefit that are often components of future imaginaries. This paper reports on the project Solar Radiation Management: Foresight for Governance (SRM4G), which aimed to encourage an anticipatory mode of thinking about the future of an engineered climate. Leveraging the participation of 15 scholars and practitioners heavily engaged in early conversations on SRM governance, SRM4G applied scenario construction to generate a set of alternative futures leading to 2030, each exercising different influences on the need for - and challenges associated with - development of SRM technologies. The scenarios then provided the context for the design of systems of governance with the capacity and legitimacy to respond to those challenges, and for the evaluation of the advantages and drawbacks of different options against a wide range of imaginary but plausible futures. SRM4G sought to initiate a conversation within the SRM research community on the capacity of foresight approaches to highlight the centrality of conceptions of the future to discussions of SRM's threats and opportunities, and in doing so, examined and challenged the assumptions embedded in conceptualizing SRM's aims, development and governance, and discussed the capacity of governance options to adapt to a wide range of possibilities.

Age-Related Changes in Dynamic Postural Control and Attentional Demands are Minimally Affected by Local Muscle Fatigue

Normal aging results in alterations in the visual, vestibular and somtaosensory systems, which in turn modify the control of balance. Muscle fatigue may exacerbate these age-related changes in sensory and motor functions, and also increase the attentional demands associated with dynamic postural control. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of aging on dynamic postural control and posture-related attentional demands before and after a plantar flexor fatigue protocol. Participants (young adults: n = 15; healthy seniors: n = 13) performed a dynamic postural task along the antero-posterior (AP) and the medio-lateral (ML) axes, with and without the addition of a simple reaction time (RT) task. The dynamic postural task consisted in following a moving circle on a computer screen with the representation of the center of pressure (COP). This protocol was repeated before and after a fatigue task where ankle plantar flexor muscles were targeted. The mean COP-target distance and the mean COP velocity were calculated for each trial. Cross-correlation analyses between the COP and target displacements were also performed. RTs were recorded during dual-task trials. Results showed that while young adults adopted an anticipatory control mode to move their COP as close as possible to the target center, seniors adopted a reactive control mode, lagging behind the target center. This resulted in longer COP-target distance and higher COP velocity in the latter group. Concurrently, RT increased more in seniors when switching from static stance to dynamic postural conditions, suggesting potential alterations in the central nervous system (CNS) functions. Finally, plantar flexor muscle fatigue and dual-tasking had only minor effects on dynamic postural control of both young adults and seniors. Future studies should investigate why the fatigue-induced changes in quiet standing postural control do not seem to transfer to dynamic balance tasks.

Anticipation in Object Manipulation: Behavioral and Neural Correlates.

One way to foster the understanding of the impressively skilled fine motor control of human object manipulation is to investigate the rules of the underlying fundamental mechanisms. Examining the action of grasping and lifting objects of various characteristics reveals that one vital step to handle objects in a skilled and fluent way is to predict their properties and plan motor actions accordingly. A large number of behavioral studies have extracted the factors on which we rely when we interact with objects in an anticipatory mode of action. At the same time, considerable effort was taken to elucidate the neuroanatomical areas and networks involved and crucial for anticipatory behavior by conducting functional imaging and stimulation studies and examining the deficits of patients with localized brain damage. This chapter gives an overview of these studies and tries to reconcile their findings, in order to provide an insight into the basic principles of anticipatory motor control and their underlying neural substrates.

Restaging the anxiety of the image

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image?These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

Inheriting the world: Heavenly citizenship and place

Theological treatments of land, place, and the built environment are increasingly common. Most Christian theologies of place take their cues from the presence of the Triune God. However, a theology of place must also reckon with issues of diversity, pluralization, and tolerance, and thus the way that Christians practice citizenship in their ethnic and civic communities. In other words, a profoundly Christian practice of place might appear to be a threat to an authentically pluralistic society. New Testament scholars have renewed attention to the biblical claim that those united to Christ inherit the creation with him. This sort of language is implacably political and potentially troublesome; it forces theological ethics to wrestle with Christian citizenship directly. This article argues that returning to the resurrection is a particularly important ground for Christian habits of place. The resurrection grounds both an unvarnished Christian witness to the Trinitarian meaning of place while also framing Christian citizenship as an eschatologically anticipatory mode of life, along the lines of what Augustine describes in the City of God.

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

Obstetrical care as a matter of time: ultrasound screening, temporality and prevention.

This article explores the ways in which ultrasound screening influences the temporal dimensions of prevention in the obstetrical management of pregnancy. Drawing on praxeographic perspectives and empirically based on participant observation of ultrasound examinations in obstetricians' offices, it asks how ultrasound scanning facilitates anticipatory modes of pregnancy management, and investigates the entanglement of different notions of time and temporality in the highly risk-oriented modes of prenatal care in Germany. Arguing that the paradoxical temporality of prevention--acting now in the name of the future--is intensified by ultrasound screening, I show how the attribution of risk regarding foetal growth in prenatal check-ups is based on the fragmentation of procreative time and ask how time standards come into play, how pregnancy is located in calendrical time, and how notions of foetal time and the everyday life times of pregnant women clash during negotiations between obstetricians and pregnant women about the determination of the due date. By analysing temporality as a practical accomplishment via technological devices such as ultrasound, the paper contributes to debates in feminist STS studies on the role of time in reproduction technologies and the management of pregnancy and birth in contemporary societies.