Planning Actions Through Anticipation

From: Chris Francovich (cfran@micron.net)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2000 - 15:26:34 PST


Hello All,

I am wondering what interested people think about the text quoted
below. I am involved in a 3 year study looking at patient
centered care at our local VA hospital under a VA Health Services
Research and Development Grant(HSR&D). We are using a CHAT type
approach and are at the end of our first year. We are now coding
and analyzing our participant/observer data and using
operational, action, and activity level categories to help parse
the data. We are also coding breakdowns and seeking ways to link
their effects to the nested levels. The perspective articulated
by Jakob Bardram below is appealing to me for its strong links to
the psychology of the individual and the practical treatment of
artifacts in a primary care clinic.

Any feedback would be appreciated?
Thanks,

Chris Francovich

Snipped:
" Planning Recurrent Actions through Anticipatory Reflection
At all three levels the human activity is guided by anticipation.
This anticipation is the motive of the activity, the goal of the
action and the orienting basis of the operation, respectively.
The anticipation of future events is the fundamental principle of
anticipatory reflection as developed by Anokhin. The classical
example of anticipatory reflection is Anokhin's rethinking of
Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex: When a dog
salivates in response to the ringing of a bell, it is not because
saliva is needed to digest the bell but because the dog
anticipates food to appear in the future which has to be
digested. The anticipatory reflection guides the activity by
making an afferent synthesis between a perception of the
environmental state of the activity, and memory (i.e. the
cumulated experience of the person). This afferent synthesis
forms an anticipation of the future state as a result of the
activity about to be performed. When the activity is performed
there is a feedback mechanism which compares the result of the
activity with the prediction, and any incongruence (i.e. a
breakdown) gives rise to a learning situation (i.e. the
experience of the person is expanded). This model of anticipatory
reflection based on the afferent synthesis between perception and
memory is a general model for all levels of the activity.
The basic principle that makes the anticipatory reflection
possible is the recognition of recurrent structures in the world.
The existing of all living beings and their reflection of
recurrent structures, which repeat themselves over time, is the
indispensable prerequisite for prediction. Pavlov's experiments
also illustrate this because the response is mutually correlated
with the amount of training sessions."

From:
http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~bardram/ECSCW97.html



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