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Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of Skill Experience
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
... The ACT-R cognitive architecture fundamentally distinguishes between declarative and procedural knowledge, which accords with the literature on skill acquisition in philosophy and psychology (Squire, 1992;Christensen, Sutton, & McIlwain, 2016). Declarative knowledge is formatted propositionally and structured within semantic networks. ...
This paper investigates the computational mechanisms underlying a type of metacognitive monitoring known as detached mindfulness, a particularly effective therapeutic technique within cognitive psychology. While research strongly supports the capacity of detached mindfulness to reduce depression and anxiety, its cognitive and computational underpinnings remain largely unexplained. We employ a computational model of metacognitive skill to articulate the mechanisms through which a detached perception of affect reduces emotional reactivity.
... The ACT-R cognitive architecture fundamentally distinguishes between declarative and procedural knowledge, which accords with the literature on skill acquisition in philosophy and psychology (Squire, 1992;Christensen, Sutton, & McIlwain, 2016). Declarative knowledge is formatted propositionally and structured within semantic networks. ...
... A process is considered preconscious when it potentially carries enough activation to become accessible to the mind but is temporarily out of conscious awareness because of, e.g., a lack of top-down attentional amplification. In this context, automatic skill-related processes may also be categorized as preconscious (e.g., Kihlstrom, 2013;Moors and De Houwer, 2006;Christensen et al., 2019;Vrabel and Zeigler-Hill, 2020). Moreover, it has been emphasized (Moors, 2009(Moors, , 2013 that the top-down automatic processes are usually unconscious, but they are not inaccessible to the mind. ...
This study investigated whether dynamical perceptual-motor primitives (DPMPs) could also be used to capture human navigation in a first-person herding task. To achieve this aim, human participants played a first-person herding game, in which they were required to corral virtual cows, called targets, into a specified containment zone. In addition to recording and modelling participants’ movement trajectories during gameplay, participants’ target-selection decisions (i.e. the order in which participants corralled targets) were recorded and modelled. The results revealed that a simple DPMP navigation model could effectively reproduce the movement trajectories of participants and that almost 80% of the participants’ target-selection decisions could be captured by a simple heuristic policy. Importantly, when this policy was coupled to the DPMP navigation model, the resulting system could successfully simulate and predict the behavioural dynamics (movement trajectories and target-selection decisions) of participants in novel multi-target contexts. Implications of the findings for understanding complex human perceptual-motor behaviour and the development of artificial agents for robust human–machine interaction are discussed.
Automating a perceptual-motor task will not win you a perceptual-motor contest. Despite claims that mindless automaticity is the essence of expertise, the view espoused here is that automaticity is worthwhile only because it enables the expert to plan and strategize. Indeed, the purpose of learning to manually shift gears is to eventually ignore that function to focus instead on actual driving. To perform well, the expert must transition their attention from a task’s low-level components to its high-level nuances. This is best understood in real-world scenarios (e.g. driving, in which performance is dynamic and sometimes competitive). This argument is based on a years-long, longitudinal case study of learning to play the puzzle game, Tetris. Tetris is intensively perceptual-motor with complicated manual routines needed to manage expert game speeds. For this case study, the player began as an advanced novice but successfully transitioned to championship level in the 2020 Classic Tetris World Championship. Initially, the challenge was gaining enough skill to make and execute perceptual-motor decisions in a fraction of a second. However, once that process became automatic, the player could spend those freed mental resources elsewhere. Performance was better for all games when the player was mentally engaged and used their focused attention to plan ahead rather than just automatically respond to the game pieces. We argue that the end goal for automating perceptual-motor skills in competitive, dynamic environments is to free cognitive space in the brain for the user to excel strategically.
This chapter considers whether optimal/peak performance is as automatic or ‘mindless’ as many accounts of expertise suggest. It starts by exploring the phenomenon known as ‘flow’ which is typically presented as evidence that peak performance is mindless or automatic in nature. It then reviews recent literature in this area which reveals that the mind remains online during skilled action and especially during ‘clutch’ performances or when athletes are seeking to ‘make it happen’. It proceeds to discuss how ‘mindedness’ and bodily awareness are integral features of peak performance. It then uses this argument to uncover the potential perils associated with ‘non-mindedness’ or automated performance. In particular, the chapter discusses how excessive automaticity prevents athletes from exercising attentional control and results in a number of undesirable outcomes including slips, lapses, and in extreme cases, ‘choking’ under pressure.
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