Anticipation, Action and Consequences

Perception and action selection by anticipation of sensorimotor consequences

Action effect anticipation: neurophysiological basis and functional consequences.

Voluntary actions are thought to be selected with respect to their intended goal. Converging data suggests that medial frontal cortex plays a crucial role in linking actions to their predicted effects. Recent neuroimaging data also suggests that during action selection, the brain pre-activities the representation of the predicted action effect. We review evidence of action effect prediction, bo...

Action–effect anticipation in infant action control

There is increasing evidence that action effects play a crucial role in action understanding and action control not only in adults but also in infants. Most of the research in infants focused on the learning of action-effect contingencies or how action effects help infants to infer goals in other persons' actions. In contrast, the present research aimed at demonstrating that infants control the...

Anticipation and the control of voluntary action

A major hallmark in the adaptive control of voluntary action is the ability to anticipate short and long term future events. Anticipation in its various forms is an important prerequisite for cognitive abilities such as planning, reasoning and the pursuit of both immediate goals and long-term goals (e.g., to invest in pension funds) that sometimes stand in opposition to immediate desires and ne...

Action preferences and the anticipation of action outcomes.

Skilled performers of time-constrained motor actions acquire information about the action preferences of their opponents in an effort to better anticipate the outcome of that opponent's actions. However, there is reason to doubt that knowledge of an opponent's action preferences would unequivocally influence anticipatory responses in a positive way. It is possible that overt information about a...