Daphne Garrido
Preprint · Version 1.0 · September 2026 - Preprint on Zenodo
Status: Not peer reviewed. Critical review and prospective registered-research proposal.
Series: The Human Embodied Intelligence Research Program · Preprint 3
Anticipatory Physiological Activity.pdf
Reports of anticipatory physiological activity describe differences in autonomic or neural measures during a pre-stimulus interval as a function of a subsequently selected, nominally unpredictable stimulus. The literature is unusual because, if conventional sensory leakage, expectation, temporal dependence, analytic flexibility, and other artifacts are excluded, the temporal ordering implied by the effect is not explained by established psychophysiological mechanisms.
This paper therefore treats anticipatory physiological activity neither as an established capacity nor as evidence of precognition, but as a contested empirical claim requiring unusually stringent confirmatory testing.
The 2012 Mossbridge, Tressoldi, and Utts meta-analysis synthesized 26 reports and estimated a small standardized effect of approximately 0.21. Duggan and Tressoldi’s 2018 update added 19 studies comprising 27 experiments and 36 effect sizes and reported a multilevel weighted effect of approximately 0.28, while also finding substantial heterogeneity.
These summaries motivate further study but do not settle the phenomenon because the literature remains vulnerable to laboratory concentration, heterogeneous protocols, dependence among observations, expectation and sequence effects, data-processing choices, selective reporting, and the difficulty of distinguishing confirmatory from exploratory analyses.
A prospective protocol is proposed in which the primary test is preregistered, blinded, independently replicated, software-validated, temporally locked, and evaluated on held-out data with a fixed preprocessing and statistical pipeline. The protocol is designed so that a null or contradictory result can count directly against the hypothesized pre-stimulus effect.
Within the broader Human Embodied Intelligence Research Program, anticipatory physiology is therefore retained only as an exploratory candidate dimension whose inclusion in any higher-order construct depends on successful independent replication.
Keywords: anticipatory physiological activity; pre-stimulus physiology; presentiment; psychophysiology; preregistration; replication; expectation bias; autonomic physiology; electrodermal activity; heart-rate variability; EEG; confirmatory research.
The publication architecture for the Human Embodied Intelligence Research Program deliberately separates anticipatory physiological activity from the more established literatures reviewed in Preprint 2.
That decision is methodological rather than rhetorical.
Interoception, autonomic regulation, cardiac-cortical interaction, and sensorimotor grounding have substantial conventional literatures. By contrast, the claim that physiology differentiates future stimulus classes before a genuinely unpredictable event is scientifically controversial and would be extraordinary if robust.