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Towards Adaptive Support for Anticipatory Thinking

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Published:05 April 2018Publication History

ABSTRACT

Adaptive training and support technologies have been used to improve training and performance in a number of domains. However, limited work on adaptive training has examined anticipatory thinking, which is the deliberate, divergent exploration and analysis of relevant futures to avoid surprise. Anticipatory thinking engages the process of imagining how uncertainties impact the future, helps identify leading indicators and causal dependencies of future scenarios, and complements forecasting, which focuses on assessing the likelihood of outcomes. It is particularly important for intelligence analysis, mission planning, and strategic forecasting, wherein practitioners apply prospective sense-making, scenario planning, and other methodologies to identify possible options and their effects during decision making processes. However, there is currently no underlying cognitive theory supporting specific anticipatory thinking methodologies, no adaptive technologies to support their training, and no existing measures to assess their efficacy.

We are engaged in an ongoing effort to design adaptive technologies to support the acquisition and measurement of anticipatory thinking. As a first step toward adaptive environments that support the acquisition and application of anticipatory thinking competencies, we have developed a task to measure anticipatory thinking in which participants explore uncertainties and the impacts on the future given a particular topic. We present preliminary results from a study to examine the validity of this measure and discuss multiple factors that affect anticipatory thinking including attention, inhibitory control, need for cognition, need for closure, convergent thinking, and divergent thinking. We then introduce design principles for supporting training, application, and assessment of anticipatory thinking.

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Other conferences
          TechMindSociety '18: Proceedings of the Technology, Mind, and Society
          April 2018
          143 pages
          ISBN:9781450354202
          DOI:10.1145/3183654

          Copyright © 2018 Owner/Author

          Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 5 April 2018

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          • abstract
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Acceptance Rates

          TechMindSociety '18 Paper Acceptance Rate17of63submissions,27%Overall Acceptance Rate17of63submissions,27%

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