How Touch, Anticipation and Executive Skills All Work Together for Success

We've probably long since filed anticipation away in the back of our brains.  No more Christmas mornings with presents under the tree.  Seeing your fiance waiting at the end of the aisle.  Or waiting for that bonus check (as if).

But now a new study says that anticipation is something we need to think about in the working world, and not just when it comes to bonuses.

According to newswise.com, this study of six-to-eight-year-olds (ok, so they're pretty irrelevant to us) showed how anticipation relates to executive function skills.

Say what? The study explored specifically what happens in children’s brains when they anticipate a touch to the hand, and relates this brain activity to the executive functions the child demonstrates on other mental tasks. The ability to anticipate, researchers found, also indicates an ability to focus.

“Executive function” is a broad term that encompasses various skills necessary for organizing information and controlling one’s own behavior. Selective attention — the ability to focus on a specific thought or task at the expense of others — is an executive function skill related directly to anticipation, because it involves knowing what to expect of an event, however small, and how to respond to it," newswise relates.

“Anticipation is what keeps us from being shocked and surprised by the world,” says Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington professor of psychology and co-director of I-LABS, at the web site. “When you pick up a pencil or fork, when someone rolls a ball to you, or when someone approaches you and extends their hand to shake it, you’re anticipating a tactile impact.

"“We cannot just respond when something has happened; we need to anticipate what will happen. In the real world, we don’t just live in the present; we live partly in the future," he adds.

While other research has examined how children and adults anticipate something they will see, no research has been done on children’s expectation of touch, or the role of touch in measuring children’s executive function skills, notes Staci Weiss, a doctoral student at Temple and the corresponding author of the study. Other studies, too, have shown that children’s executive function skills at around age 6 correlate with children’s academic performance.

“Anticipatory brain activity prepares for the future, making incoming information a little more predictable so it’s easier to focus attention on what is important. The neural anticipation of touch had not been captured in children,” Weiss explains. “What’s exciting is that children’s ability to anticipate an upcoming event — in this case, a touch to the hand — was related to how well they could control their attention. The amount of change in children’s brain response during anticipation of touch was associated with cognitive skills more broadly, not just in the tactile domain, but in broader ways that might be useful for children in the classroom.”  And the workplace?