Our life is lived on the ever moving border between Past and Future, in a now and here. Time and space are the fundamental categories in our cognitive system. Anticipatory behavior involves a temporary combination of Past and Future, for which the momentary situation is the point of departure. It implies plans for action, in which both time and space are essential: The future behavior will take place at a certain moment in time and at a certain place, not far from now, not far from here. Each action is aimed at a goal. Preparation of an action implies the foreseeing of the consequences of the crucial event that will trigger the action. In other words the preparation is based upon a view from the future. This future has not yet been changed in a now. We are able to imagine our future behavior as if it takes place now. The notion “Anticipation” has a teleological flavor, as if something in the future is determining our present behavior. In fact our view from the future is based upon our past experiences. These determine the possibility to imagine what will be going on in the nearby time to come. Actually it is the memory of these past experiences upon which our expectancies are based and which determines our future behavior. The imagination of future behavior initiates the temporo-spatially ordered activation of neural structures, which is a necessary condition for the realization of the action. The very existence of anticipatory behavior indicates that our behavior is organized in a top-down way instead of as a chain of reflexes. It is clear that such a top-down interpretation of behavior is in contrast to a Stimulus–Response Psychology which attributes to the stimulus the role of an exclusive determinant of a following response. In a critical review of “set” and related notions, Gibson (1941) concluded that behavior was determined by something else besides the immediately preceding stimulus. Hebb (1949, loc.cit., p. 5) added that this “does not deny the importance of the immediate stimulus, it does deny that sensory stimulation is everything in behavior.” In between, we are better informed about the central process “which seems to be relatively independent of afferent stimuli”.

Consistency in our behavior becomes manifest in a well-balanced spatial and temporal relationship with our environment. It is based upon our ability to learn from experience. This helps us, where possible, to anticipate future events by which an optimal adaptation to our environment is realized. It involves an implicit time estimation, i.e. an estimation of the duration of the interval prior to the occurrence of an expected stimulus, or prior to the moment at which an action has to be generated. The aim of preparatory processes is to pre-activate certain brain structures during that interval in order to ameliorate the upcoming information processing. This is a selective process, in which – as far as possible – a choice is made between what is relevant and what is not. Selection can operate in two ways: by a local increase in excitation of the relevant structures, and/or by a local inhibition of the irrelevant structures. Each of these changes in excitability, or their combination, leads to a better signal-to-noise ratio. Anticipatory behavior implies an increase in alertness and a focused attention upon both the perceptual input and the motor output. In other words, it becomes manifest in the perceptual and the motor domain. In most circumstances “Attention” is indeed aimed at a better perception, but mostly to do something with it, that is to integrate the perceived thing into an action. “Motor Preparation” is aimed at an appropriate action, but often this is a response upon some change in the stimulus environment. After all much of our behavior is triggered by changes in our environment, which have to be monitored in order to be discovered.

There are good reasons to suppose that the prefrontal cortex has a supervisory role in the planning of our behavior to come, thus in the organization of the selective processes at different cerebral locations. Selection in perception may or may not concern just one modality, and it can but needs not to be directed upon one attribute within that modality. If some action is supposed to take place after the presentation of a green light, and another after that of a red light, green and red become relevant colors, while all other colors are irrelevant. Structures relevant for the perception of the green and the red light have to be selectively excited, and/or those for the perception of other colors have to be inhibited. The coupling of a color to a movement is the consequence of an instruction, or of a long-term learning process. The coupling has to be kept in memory, for the duration of an experimental session, or, in every day life, forever (e.g. the prohibitive meaning of a red light for all traffic participants). In other words for a concrete task a working memory network has to be formed that becomes activated either from the recent instruction or from a source in a long-term memory. In the latter case earlier experiences with comparable situations might become activated as well, and contribute to the actual working memory network.