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The Irreducible Embeddedness of Action Choice in Sport
Abstract
The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice.
This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. With twenty-six chapters by leading researchers, the book connects and integrates findings from fields that range from philosophy of mind to sociology of sports. The chapters show not only that sports can tell scientists how the human mind works but also that the scientific study of the human mind can help athletes succeed. Sports psychology research has always focused on the themes, notions, and models of embodied cognition; embodied cognition, in turn, has found striking confirmation of its theoretical claims in the psychological accounts of sports performance and athletic skill. Athletic skill is a legitimate form of intelligence, involving cognitive faculties no less sophisticated and complex than those required by mathematical problem solving.
After presenting the key concepts necessary for applying embodied cognition to sports psychology, the book discusses skill disruption (the tendency to “choke” under pressure); sensorimotor skill acquisition and how training correlates to the development of cognitive faculties; the intersubjective and social dimension of sports skills, seen in team sports; sports practice in cultural and societal contexts; the notion of “affordance” and its significance for ecological psychology and embodied cognition theory; and the mind's predictive capabilities, which enable anticipation, creativity, improvisation, and imagination in sports performance.
Contributors Ana Maria Abreu, Kenneth Aggerholm, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Duarte Araújo, Jürgen Beckmann, Kath Bicknell, Geoffrey P. Bingham, Jens E. Birch, Gunnar Breivik, Noel E. Brick, Massimiliano L. Cappuccio, Thomas H. Carr, Alberto Cei, Anthony Chemero, Wayne Christensen, Lincoln J. Colling, Cassie Comley, Keith Davids, Matt Dicks, Caren Diehl, Karl Erickson, Anna Esposito, Pedro Tiago Esteves, Mirko Farina, Giolo Fele, Denis Francesconi, Shaun Gallagher, Gowrishankar Ganesh, Raúl Sánchez-García, Rob Gray, Denise M. Hill, Daniel D. Hutto, Tsuyoshi Ikegami, Geir Jordet, Adam Kiefer, Michael Kirchhoff, Kevin Krein, Kenneth Liberman, Tadhg E. MacIntyre, Nelson Mauro Maldonato, David L. Mann, Richard S. W. Masters, Patrick McGivern, Doris McIlwain, Michele Merritt, Christopher Mesagno, Vegard Fusche Moe, Barbara Gail Montero, Aidan P. Moran, David Moreau, Hiroki Nakamoto, Alberto Oliverio, David Papineau, Gert-Jan Pepping, Miriam Reiner, Ian Renshaw, Michael A. Riley, Zuzanna Rucinska, Lawrence Shapiro, Paula Silva, Shannon Spaulding, John Sutton, Phillip D. Tomporowski, John Toner, Andrew D. Wilson, Audrey Yap, Qin Zhu, Christopher Madan
... Climbing techniques, including planning techniques, will be learned and exercised in the context of the opportunities and constraints of a given environment. Hence, EECS can refer to ecological dynamics model and the notion of affordances to account for decision-making taking place in action (Araújo et al. 2019) as well as characterization of route previewing strategies as relying on perception of nested affordances, as described in Seifert et al. (2017). ...
... It involves the same motoric processes activated in response to the environment, in a faster timeframe. 14 As Araújo et al. (2019) propose, "Conceptualizing such landscapes of action possibilities for sport performers shows how difficult it is to prescribe the existence in advance of 'the optimal' decision for a particular performer. This is because affordances are dynamic and differ in stability (i.e., they emerge and dissolve momentarily in landscapes within dynamic performance environments), dependent on interactions of intrinsic dynamics of an individual performer, as well as task dynamics and environmental constraints.". 15 The radical enactive branch of EECS will also be motivated by the introduction of contentful representations in Type 2 processing. ...
This paper analyzes the skilled performance of rock climbing through the framework of Embodied and Enacted Cognitive Science. It introduces a notion of enactive planning that is part of one mindful activity of ongoing responsiveness to the affordances of the wall. The paper takes two distinct planning activities involved in rock climbing—route-reading and visualizing—and clarifies them through the enactivist and ecological concepts of nested affordances, prospecting, recalibrating, marking, and corporeal imaginings, as well as Rylean concept of heeding. The paper shows that an enactive approach to planning can make sense of both the planning done in preparation of the climb, and re-planning done during the mindful performance, without invoking additional cognitive architectures.
... From this perspective, the nestedness and relatedness of constraints play an important role in the explanation of skilled behaviour and the experiences therein (Balagué et al., 2019). The interaction between these nested scales (Kelty- Stephen & Wallot, 2017) is characterised by impredicative entailments that define complex systems (Rosen, 1991) and signifies the irreducibly embedded nature of performance (Araújo, Davids, & McGivern, 2019). In practical terms this means that a set of constraints governing a flow activity can both arise out of interactions and serve to constrain behaviours emerging at shorter timescales. ...
Flow is an optimal state of absorption that may be experienced in appropriately challenging and intrinsically motivating activities such as sports. Flow may be an important concept for understanding the emergence and role of sport in society, yet theoretical explanations of flow have had limited success explaining, predicting, and facilitating flow in sport. Here, we use the ecological dynamics framework, seeking to resolve foundational issues in an explanation of flow, building towards a theory of flow in sport. To address this challenge, we highlight the utility of ecological conceptualisations of experience, intention, skill, attention, information, and temporality, in explanations of flow experiences in sport, before discussing some novel empirical predictions motivated by the theory. We suggest that a multiscale ecological dynamics approach is well equipped to explore flow in performer-environment systems that display interaction-dominant dynamics and conclude by outlining avenues for future research created by an ecological dynamics theory of flow in sport.
... Moreover, by endorsing stimulus variability and multiple contexts, inhibitory retrieval fits well with training procedures derived from the ecological dynamic approach to sport performance (Ara ujo et al., 2006(Ara ujo et al., , 2010(Ara ujo et al., , 2019Davids et al., 2001;Warren, 2006). Indeed, both approaches advocate the importance of an individual forming functional performer-environment relationships during competitions and practices. ...
Inhibitory retrieval has redefined the way that exposure therapy can help individuals cope with debilitative states of fear and anxiety. Here we propose that an inhibitory retrieval-based model of exposure therapy could also be applied to the context of sport competition. We first discuss the usefulness of applying inhibitory retrieval-based exposure to emotion regulation in sport environments and provide therapeutic strategies for adopting this approach for athletes with performance anxiety and states of fear of failure. This proposal is followed by a case description that illustrates how this inhibitory retrieval approach could be used to help athletes get better at coping with fear and anxiety during a sport competition. We conclude by providing further guidelines for helping practitioners apply the inhibitory retrieval approach while working with athletes who experience debilitative states of anxiety during sport competition. Lay summary: This theoretical and case study paper discusses the application of inhibitory retrieval-based exposure for helping athletes who experience dysfunctional states of anxiety during competition. Inhibitory retrieval-based exposure aims to assist the athletes in creating new experiences when confronted with the pressure of sport competition. Here we aim to describe in detail how inhibitory retrieval-based exposure could be applied to sport environments by providing therapeutic strategies for adopting this approach for athletes with performance anxiety and states of fear of failure.
• IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
• Inhibitory retrieval-based exposure helps athletes cope with states of debilitative anxiety.
• This approach should also help athletes focus on optimal ways to perform under anxiety.
• Inhibitory retrieval-based exposure should reinvigorate the athlete-environment dynamic.
... This player-environmentcentred pedagogical approach advocates manipulation of informational constraints to build representative learning scenarios, supporting a tight action-perception coupling to utilise affordances available in training and competition (Woods, McKeown, Shuttleworth, Davids, & Robertson, 2019). Continuous representative practice allows players to become perceptually attuned to affordances of and for others, stimulating their ability to efficiently (re)organise collective behaviours in competition (Araújo, Davids, & McGivern, 2018). In volleyball based on opposition tactics (e.g., high frequency of line attacks), a practice task can be constrained by rules (e.g., hitters only attacking the line) to induce the block-defence ST needed to overcome opponents in competition. ...
Combining Constraint-led (ecological) and Step-Game (constructivist) approaches through an Action-Research (AR) design conducted throughout a competitive volleyball season, this study aimed to: (i) analyse the impact of increased tactical complexity on lateral and longitudinal collective synchronisation tendencies during defensive and offensive counterattack-subphases, and (ii) examine how opposition attacking contexts (i.e., playing in full-system or in-system) might influence synchronisation tendencies throughout each counterattack-subphase. Performance of a youth team, comprised of fifteen players, was studied across three AR-cycles. The team’s competitive performance was analysed through three competitive matches (one per cycle). Team synchronisation tendencies were evaluated using the cluster-phase method and a 3 (matches) x 2 (counterattack-subphases) x 2 (opposition attacking contexts) x 2 (court directions) repeated-measures ANOVA were used to calculate the differences in cluster-amplitude mean values. Results showed that increments in tactical complexity (second AR-cycle) were followed by decreases in collective synchronisation tendencies, which were (re)achieved during the third AR-cycle, possibly due to the ecological-constructivist coaching intervention. Our findings imply that coaches could design representative and specific-didactical learning environments, predicated on a team’s tactical needs and strategical ideas from a game-plan, framing player intentionality. Results also support the use of questioning strategies to narrow players’ attentional focus, stimulating perceptual attunement to relevant constraints emerging in performance. Finally, the insider AR-design provided valuable contextualised insights on coaching interventions for developing collective coordinative structures.
... This player-environment-centred approach highlights the need to build representative learning tasks, using constraints manipulation, so that players can learn to use specified fields of information (a landscape of affordances) to functionally adapt their tactical performance behaviours (Passos & Davids, 2015). Through implementing this type of practice design, players become perceptually attuned to affordances of and for others, adjusting their actions rapidly to teammates and/or opponents' actions (Araújo et al., 2018;Silva et al., 2013). Particularly in volleyball, the ability to be perceptual attuned to different affordances can be crucial during the counterattack-phase when the opposition has possession of the ball (Mesquita et al., 2013). ...
An Action-Research (AR) design was implemented throughout a competitive season in which Constraint-led and Step-Game approaches were combined. This intervention study investigated the impact of increased performance complexity on emergence of counterattacking synchronisation tendencies in team players (laterally and longitudinally on court) at different set moments. Fifteen youth volleyball team players were studied across three action-research cycles, with performance in one competitive match analysed per cycle. Team synchronisation tendencies were assessed using the cluster phase method, with a 3 (matches) x 2 (set moments) x 2 (court direction) repeated-measures ANOVA statistical procedure to calculate differences in cluster amplitude mean values. Results revealed a reduction in team synchrony levels when tactical complexity of counterattacking play increased (second AR-cycle). Nevertheless, similar levels of team synchrony emerged between the first and third AR-cycles. Results also revealed the final moments of a set as a significant environmental constraint that shaped synchronisation tendencies. Evidence suggested that the (re)achievement of functional synchrony was realised through integration of Constraint-led and Step-Game approaches during practices designed to enhance tactical awareness in players. Finally, an insider action-research design provided relevant contextualised insights on the development of a team’s synchronisation tendencies.
... They articulated for ping-pong players an imaginary triangle composed of the ball's idealized tripartite linear trajectory: (1) from the opponent's paddle to your side of the table; (2) from the table up toward you; and then complemented by (3) your own prospective strike that you anticipate then consummate. Thus, students of physical skills can avail of deliberate instructions to engage with configurations of actual and imaginary environmental features, even when these instructions grossly underspecify physiological detail (Araújo, Davids, and McGivern 2019;Hutto and Sánchez-García 2015). ...
... Information picked up by a performer becomes more subtle, elaborate, and precise with task-specific experience and when it is coupled successfully to actions. The key point is that, although performers can learn knowledge about a performance environment, which can allow them to describe the decisions and actions they may undertake, coaches need to ensure that during representative tasks learners are using knowledge of the environment to (self)regulate using tactical behaviors and decisions to support the perception of information and continuously (re)organize actions (Araújo et al., 2018). ...
Using an action-research design, this study examined the impact of combining concepts from two contemporary pedagogical approaches, the Constraints-led Approach (CLA) and Step-Game Approach (SGA), on the development of youth volleyballers’ tactical knowledge, as expressed in performance, throughout a full competitive season. Fifteen players and one coach participated in this study, which involved three action-research cycles, each including the processes of planning, acting and monitoring, reflecting, and fact-finding. The first author, who had the role of coach-researcher, collected data using a reflexive diary and field notes between September 2017 and June 2018, as well as eight semi-structured focus-group interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, in which inductive procedures deepened understanding of the development of the participants’ tactical knowledge. Findings suggested that combining CLA with SGA improved tactical knowledge in specific ways. Players progressed from a starting point where they were only able to describe game scenarios, and act without tactical criteria or considering contextual game constraints, to a point where their intentions during tactical actions were shaped by their ability to think strategically and guide their attention to recognize and interpret different constraints. Results suggested that the development of players’ tactical knowledge benefited from a mutual integration of different, yet complementary, pedagogical approaches. By integrating SGA and CLA it was possible to enhance players’ adaptable thinking using learning tasks involving the manipulation of meaningful constraints that afforded variable repetition and the resolution of tactical problems.
... They articulated for ping-pong players an imaginary triangle composed of the ball's idealized tripartite linear trajectory: (1) from the opponent's paddle to your side of the table; (2) from the table up toward you; and then complemented by (3) your own prospective strike that you anticipate then consummate. Thus, students of physical skills can avail of deliberate instructions to engage with configurations of actual and imaginary environmental features, even when these instructions grossly underspecify physiological detail (Araújo, Davids, and McGivern 2019;Hutto and Sánchez-García 2015). ...
Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one’s action–perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.
The purpose of this dissertation was to study the ecological dynamics of decision-making in judo. The understanding of judo performance has followed information-processing models, which assume "correct" and pre-determined decisions, but neglect how judokas interact throughout the combat. Alternatively, ecological dynamics emphasizes the judoka-judoka system's coordination, in which attacking decisions emerge from actualizing affordances that athletes mutually offer and directly perceive, being expressed via transitions in interpersonal movement coordination. Wearable technologies allow measuring such interpersonal movement and further coordination in combat situations. This dissertation begins by reviewing the literature on decision-making in sport. It then introduces a preliminary methodological study to validate an inertial system. Next, this dissertation reports an experimental study to analyze the dynamics of decision-making in judo, concluding that attacking decisions can be modeled as transitions between interpersonal coordination driven by relative body orientation misalignments that create throwing affordances. Finally, this dissertation discusses how judo decision-making is an embodied and situated phenomenon, hypothesizing that expertise entails intentionally performing in meta-stability. This dissertation informs judo training, namely designing tasks focusing on throwing affordances and perception-action processes.
Enactive cognition emphasizes co‐constructive roles of humans and their environment in shaping cognitive processes. It is specifically engaged in the mental simulation of behaviors, enhancing the connection between perception and action. Here we investigated the core network of brain regions involved in enactive cognition as applied to mental simulations of physical exercise. We used a neuroimaging paradigm in which participants (N = 103) were required to project themselves running or plogging (running while picking‐up litter) along an image‐guided naturalistic trail. Using both univariate and multivariate brain imaging analyses, we find that a broad spectrum of brain activation discriminates between the mental simulation of plogging versus running. Critically, we show that self‐reported ratings of daily life running engagement and the quality of mental simulation (how well participants were able to imagine themselves running) modulate the brain reactivity to plogging versus running. Finally, we undertook functional connectivity analyses centered on the insular cortex, which is a key region in the dynamic interplay between neurocognitive processes. This analysis revealed increased positive and negative patterns of insular‐centered functional connectivity in the plogging condition (as compared to the running condition), thereby confirming the key role of the insular cortex in action simulation involving complex sets of mental mechanisms. Taken together, the present findings provide new insights into the brain networks involved in the enactive mental simulation of physical exercise.
Background: In this paper, we explore physical education from a relational worldview. Theoretically guided by an ecological dynamics framework, this perspective calls us to conceptualise ‘education’ in its etymological roots – ex-ducere – meaning ‘to lead’ an individual ‘out’ into the world. In doing so, an educator would employ a ‘softer’ pedagogy, seeking to guide the attention and encourage exploration of a less experienced individual toward the perception of things that can support, or regulate, their behaviours. This pedagogical approach could help learners to self regulate in the environment, becoming more responsive to emergent opportunities for action available.
Theory: This is a pedagogy of exploration, search, discovery, invention and adaptation that is devised from three of the contributing theories to ecological dynamics: ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory and complexity sciences. Throughout this paper we show that this progressive view contrasts with the more traditional perspectives of physical education, grounded in established pedagogical approaches that are often pre-occupied with instilling idealised ways of moving in learners, typically at the expense of appreciating how the environment reciprocally shapes behaviour.
Practical Implications: In an effort to support educators with integrating an ecological conceptualisation of PE into their practice we outline three cornerstones. We bring these ideas to life by concluding the paper with the presentation of three practical examples that transcends the physical educational journey from primary/elementary school through to secondary/ high schools. We exemplify how an ecological approach to PE can move us closer to achieving the aim of enabling children to lead a physically active life beyond the school gates.
This study examined the experiential knowledge of eight Australian national-level football referees (3.2 yrs mean national-level experience) about the notion of consistent decision-making during competitive matches. Using a grounded theory approach, the analysis revealed that participants view “consistency” as context-dependent, rather than a rigid process of uniformly responding to isolated foul-play transgressions with putatively correct responses. Our results present two key conceptual abstractions—”referential and game dependent” and “purpose and context”—as a framework for understanding referee decision-making consistency. Results evidence that in higher level referees, consistent decision-making performance is an emergent process defined by the decision-making actions of the referee, and exploitation of specifying contextual game factors. Our discussion outlines how this process can be understood as dynamical transactions within a complex system (i.e. competitive football game), in which varying decision-making responses to superficially similar incidents is a marker of expertise, rather than inconsistency. These findings draw attention to the limitations of isolated foul-play video assessment, suggesting that training orientated toward complete uniform agreement on game incidents may reduce attention (attunement) to key contextual information that is necessary to prospectively control player behaviors and thus, the emergent trajectory of each game. Instead, findings support more representative game opportunities for referees to practice making decisions with key contextual information sources present. Future research could consider the extent context and/or variability define performance at different levels of competition and across sports with distinct cultural structures.
In this conceptual analysis contribution to the special issue on radical embodied cognition, we discuss how embodied cognition can exist with and without representations. We explore this concept through the lens of judgment and decision-making in sports (JDMS). Embodied cognition has featured in many investigations of human behavior, but no single approach has emerged. Indeed, the very definitions of the concepts “embodiment” and “cognition” lack consensus, and consequently the degree of “radicalism” is not universally defined, either. In this paper, we address JDMS not from a rigid theoretical perspective but from two embodied cognition approaches: one that assumes there is mediation between the athlete and the environment through mental representation, and another that assumes direct contact between the athlete and the environment and thus no need for mental representation. Importantly, our aim was not to arrive at a theoretical consensus or set up a competition between approaches but rather to provide a legitimate scientific discussion about how to explain empirical results in JDMS from contrasting perspectives within embodied cognition. For this, we first outline the definitions and constructs of embodied cognition in JDMS. Second, we detail the theory underlying the mental representation and direct contact approaches. Third, we comment on two published research papers on JDMS, one selected by each of us: (1) Correia et al. (2012) and (2) Pizzera (2012). Fourth, following the interpretation of the empirical findings of these papers, we present a discussion on the commonalities and divergences of these two perspectives and the consequences of using one or the other approach in the study of JDMS.
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