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Dynamics of Skill Acquisition
An Ecological Dynamics Approach
by Chris Button, Ludovic Seifert, Jia Yi Chow, Duarte Araujo and Keith Davids
288 Pages
Students and practitioners across a variety of professions—including coaches, physical educators, trainers, and rehabilitation specialists—will appreciate the applied focus of this second edition. Movement models throughout the text provide examples for visualizing task constraints and enhancing the study and understanding of movement behavior. Athletes and sports teams are presented as specific complex adaptive systems, with information on designing learning environments and adapting programs to foster skill development.
Readers will learn the historical evolution of dynamical systems theory and the ecological dynamics framework. These foundational concepts illustrate the integration between intentional action, cognition, and decision making and their effects on performance and behavior. Complex theoretical concepts are explained in simple terms and related to practice, focusing on the implications of the work of pioneering researchers such as Nikolai Bernstein, Egon Brunswik, James Gibson, Scott Kelso, and Karl Newell. Case studies written by practitioners contain specific examples of the ecological dynamics framework in action, bringing theory to life. By learning how to identify and manipulate key constraints that influence learning skilled behavior, readers will gain insight into practice designs for creating positive learning experiences that enable individuals to develop and learn functional movements.
Throughout the book, learning features guide readers through material with clear direction and focus to improve understanding. Spotlight on Research sidebars provide detailed descriptions of important studies to connect theory, research, and application. Lab activities teach application skills beyond the content, ensuring reader understanding. In addition, chapter objectives, self-test questions, and Key Concept sidebars highlight important concepts in each chapter.
With the study of human movement now bridging many disciplines, including motor development, psychology, biology, and physical therapy, Dynamics of Skill Acquisition, Second Edition, provides a timely analysis of the ecological dynamics framework and presents a comprehensive model for understanding how coordination patterns are assembled, controlled, and acquired. The theoretical roots and development of the ecological dynamics framework provide application strategies for all people with an interest in movement coordination and control.
Chapter 2. Physical Constraints on Coordination: Dynamical Systems Theory
Chapter 3. Informational Constraints on Coordination: An Ecological Psychology Perspective
Chapter 4. Intentionality, Cognition, and Decision Making in Sport
Chapter 5. Understanding the Dynamics of Skill Acquisition
Chapter 6. How Interacting Constraints Support a Nonlinear Pedagogy
Chapter 7. Redefining Learning: Practical Issues for Representative Learning Design
Chapter 8. Designing Individualized Practice Environments
Chapter 9. Practice for Sports Teams
Chapter 10. Modified Perceptual Training for Athletes
Chapter 11. Practitioners as Designers
Chapter 12. Expertise and Talent Development in Sport
Chris Button, PhD, is a professor and the dean of the School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his PhD in sport and exercise science in 2000 from Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. His doctoral research focused on coordination and interception skills and applying ecological concepts to the study of interceptive actions.
Button is accredited as a biomechanist through Sport and Exercise Science New Zealand. He is also an executive committee member of the Australasian Skill Acquisition Network. Button regularly works with the coaches and athletes of High Performance New Zealand and has provided sport science support in netball, football (soccer), swimming, and motor sports.
Button publishes his research in a variety of books and journals on sport science, pedagogy, and movement science. Such topics have attracted interest within both scientific and political circles, as evidenced by recent invitations to provide expertise for the New Zealand Ministry of Health, Water Safety New Zealand, High Performance Sport New Zealand, and others. He is also a soccer coach for junior and adult learners.
Ludovic Seifert, PhD, is a professor at the University of Rouen Normandy. He is the vice dean of the Centre d’Etudes des Transformations des Activités Physiques et Sportives (CETAPS) lab and the head of the master’s program in sport performance analysis. He obtained a certificate in physical education in 1998 and a PhD in sport science from the University of Rouen Normandy in 2003.
Seifert’s field of research relates to motor control and learning and expertise and talent development following an ecological dynamics approach. His emphasis focuses on movement coordination and visual-motor skills, with a particular interest in swimming and climbing. Such topics have led him to work closely with several French sport federations (such as swimming, climbing and mountaineering, and ice hockey) and professional clubs. His research has been published and cited extensively in peer-reviewed journals.
Seifert is the university’s representative for Ecological Dynamics & Sport Performance, an e-lab of UNESCO’s UniTwin Complex Systems Digital Campus program. He is also certified as a mountain guide by the International Federation of Mountain Guides Association (IFMGA).
Jia Yi Chow, PhD, is an associate professor in the physical education and sport science department in the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University. He is also an associate dean in the Office of Teacher Education at the same institute.
A physical educator by training, Chow’s area of specialization is in motor control and learning. His key research work includes nonlinear pedagogy, investigation of multiarticular coordination changes, analysis of team dynamics from an ecological psychology perspective, and examining visual-perceptual skills in sports expertise. He works closely with colleagues and practitioners in the Singapore Ministry of Education, local sport institutes, and international collaborators to enhance the work on nonlinear pedagogy.
Duarte Araújo, PhD, is an associate professor and director of the department of sport and health and faculty of human kinetics at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. He leads both the research center of this school, CIPER, as well as the Laboratory of Expertise in Sport. He is an associate editor of the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise as well as the Journal of Expertise.
Araújo’s research on sport expertise and decision making, performance analysis, and affordances for physical activity has been funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. He has published more than 130 papers in scientific journals (with over 4,500 citations in the Web of Science) and more than 15 books about expertise, team performance, variability, cognition, and decision making in sport. He also supervises several doctoral students from Portugal, Italy, and Australia.
Keith Davids, PhD, is a professor of motor learning at the Sport and Human Performance Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University. He graduated from the University of London and obtained a PhD in psychology and physical education at the University of Leeds. He has previously held professorial positions in the United Kingdom (Manchester Metropolitan University), New Zealand (University of Otago), Australia (Queensland University of Technology), and Finland (Finnish Distinguished Professor in the faculty of sport and health sciences at the University of Jyväskylä).
Davids’ research program investigates sport performance, skill acquisition, and expertise enhancement in sport and how to design learning, training, and practice environments to successfully achieve these outcomes. He collaborates on research in sport, physical activity, and exercise with colleagues at universities in Spain, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Iran, Macedonia, New Zealand, Australia, and Finland. A large proportion of his scientific and practical research has been undertaken in collaboration with the New Zealand South Island Sports Academy, the Queensland Academy of Sport, the Australian Institute of Sport, Diving Australia, Cricket Australia, GB Cycling, and the English Institute of Sport.
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
Lab activity: make your own multistable regimes
We have introduced several important concepts in this chapter that originate from the dynamical systems theory. Our hope is that it will help you to better understand these complex ideas if you were to conduct a practical activity that draws from them. Is it possible to use the prompts below to explore how learners regulate their degrees of freedom as a function of practice? Can you conceive how a metastable regime influences the likelihood of a performer adopting different movement patterns?
Experimental Problems
- Identify a movement task with which you have limited familiarity (e.g., kicking a ball over a barrier onto a target).
- As the learner, practice the activity until you reach an acceptable level of skill as defined by a relevant performance criterion (e.g., success on at least three out of four attempts).
- Identify a key control parameter for the task that you can systematically manipulate or change (e.g., height of barrier, distance to target).
- Attempt the task under the constraints of a scanning procedure to explore whether a metastable regime exists.
Equipment and Resources
- Selection of balls, discs, bats, rackets, and targets
- Open laboratory space or gymnasium
- Video camera
- Measuring tape
Hint: Many task choices are available, but it might be helpful to consider general activities that have multiple possible solutions, such as throwing, kicking, balance, or locomotion. Consider the best ways to record the movement patterns and outcomes associated with performance.
Ecological scale of behavioral analysis
When scientists attempt to understand an organism's behavior—such as how they learn new skills—it is important that they adopt an appropriate scale of analysis. Prominent psychologists such as Gibson, Brunswik, and Reed recognized this fact in developing the ecological approach. Ecology is defined as “a branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” (Merriam-Webster.com: Online Dictionary). Hence, from an ecological perspective, human behavior, for example, can only be understood in the context of the environments that humans have partly designed and in which they operate (see chapter 3). Arguably, research and practice in sport and exercise psychology have been dominated by an organismic-centric methodology and theorizing (i.e., characterized by a narrow focus on describing internal mental states and processes of individual performers) (Araújo and Davids, 2009). For too long, important elements in the environment, such as cultural norms, traditional practices, and the influence of significant others, have been conveniently ignored, yet we intuitively know that they have considerable influence on motor learning. For example, children may not feel comfortable tackling new learning challenges if their parents or caregivers have shielded them from risky situations from an early age. Let us consider sociocultural constraints in more detail.
Sociocultural Constraints
The acquisition of perceptual-motor expertise in different performance domains (e.g., clinical, physical education, music, sport coaching) is a complex, contextualized process. Theoretically, the constraints-led approach to motor learning has provided major insights, mainly from empirical research on individual and task constraints. However, as Clark (1995) suggests, there is a need to further explore the sociocultural environmental constraints of this model: “Culture also acts as environmental constraints that shape movements. Although these constraints may be more subtle than the physical ones, they are nonetheless ever-present surrounds to the actor” (Clark, 1995, p.175).
The environments in which humans learn and practice skills are flavored by sociocultural factors. For example, the presence of an evaluative coach or audience may (or may not) have a significant impact on the performer. Similarly, the culture of different clubs, regions, or countries leaves footprints that can shape the ways in which people move and act. Sociocultural constraints have always had a significant impact on sport and physical activity participation. For example, the obesity crisis that plagues the developed world may be further accentuated by societal expectations of body image, forcing more and more people away from physical activity and toward sedentary lifestyles (Lewis and Van Puymbroeck, 2008). How comfortable people are with their body shape is affected indirectly by culture and the broad set of values that society may have concerning body shape (Swami, 2015). Another obvious example is that until relatively recent times, women were not encouraged to compete in certain sports (such as soccer, tennis, rugby, and track and field) because their participation was not deemed appropriate through social norms. While recent decades have seen such gender-biased attitudes relaxing, idealistic attitudes concerning the human body are arguably strengthening, particularly in Western and modernized countries.
It is important to note that sociocultural influences, like other types of constraint, can both disable and enable skill acquisition. For example, Uehara, Button, Falcous, and Davids (2014) identified numerous factors common to Brazilian society (e.g., street soccer; capoeira, a style of martial art; and samba, a form of dance and music) that have a positive impact on the highly skillful soccer players this country historically produces (see Spotlight on Research). Also Rothwell, Davids, and Stone (2018) discussed how historical industrial working practices influenced professional coaching in team sports like the rugby league in the United Kingdom. Some of these practices in sport can be traced to militaristic training that provided the backdrop to physical education syllabi until recent decades (Moy et al., 2015). These fascinating studies underline that working practices in sport and physical education do not exist in a vacuum, but are very much continually constrained by sociocultural and historical tendencies and traditions. Indeed, one can readily identify how cultural practices and traditions present in different countries, such as dance, rituals, and other popular pastimes, enable opportunities for skill acquisition that may not exist to the same extent in other countries. Moreover, sociocultural constraints have often persisted over many generations, and their lasting influence cannot be underestimated (Rothwell et al., 2018).
Environmental constraints that impinge on a learner's development are multiple, intangible, intertwined, and dynamic (Davids, Araújo, Hristovski, and colleagues, 2013). Consequently, an ecological scale of analysis will demand a range of research methodologies to improve our understanding of human behavioral adaptation. Motor learning research has traditionally persevered with a relatively narrow range of research tools emanating from a long history of a positivistic, laboratory-based research paradigm (Uehara et al., 2014). Such tools seem suitable for investigating how unique personal constraints interact with task-related factors in the skill acquisition process (Araújo and Davids, 2011). However, for the study of far-reaching sociocultural and historical constraints, other methodologies may be more functional. Indeed, several recent studies have begun to illustrate such approaches, including interviews and observational analysis (Uehara et al., 2014), document and biographical analysis (Rees et al., 2016; Anderson and Maivorsdotter, 2016), and interpretive, phenomenological analysis of practice structure (de Bruin, 2018).
Learning design in ecological dynamics
Ecological dynamics focuses on a relevant scale of analysis for understanding learning and performance: the person-environment relationship. Using the term organismic asymmetry, Dunwoody (2007) argued that the role of the environment was being neglected by a biased tendency toward seeking to explain human behaviors through internalized referents, schema, programs, and plans. This bias in thinking has influenced models of learning for decades, skewing practice task design in sport as Davids and Araújo (2010) highlighted. This weakness was more recently acknowledged in motor behavior research (Zelaznik, 2014).
In ecological dynamics, the acquisition of skill in individual and team-based sports is based on the continuous information-based interactions between each athlete and a specific performance environment (Davids et al., 2013). Athlete-environment interactions result in the coupling of goal-directed movements to available information sources during performance. This is a fundamental principle of learning design in individual and team sports. Coupling information and movement in practice emerges when athletes continuously interact with key objects (objects to avoid or intercept in ball games), surfaces (properties of a rock surface to climb or scramble over or an icy surface to ski or skate across), events (the sudden acceleration of a lead athlete in a marathon or the emergence of a three-person block in a volleyball attack), terrain dimensions (driving to greens on different golf courses or coping with different field width and length dimensions in soccer) and features (markings on an orienteering course and dealing with a crosswind on an archery course), and significant others (changes in positioning and movements of teammates and coping with alterations to tactical patterns of opponents). To prepare for these interactions, coaches could design adaptive zones in practice contexts for athletes to explore.
Key Concept
The Performer-Environment Scale of Analysis
In 2014, Howard Zelaznik argued, in an address as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Kinesiology, that previous research had been too focused on understanding how nervous systems control movements. He proposed the following (p. 41):
- “Motor control and learning in kinesiology should move away from believing the brain holds the key to action and move out to examine the movement of people within their environment . . .future [kinesiologists] need to become a set of scholars using either the Newell framework or a Gibsonian approach.”
- “We want to understand skills from the perspective of a person moving within an environment that provides affordances and challenges. We need to stress that the proper level of analysis is a whole person interacting with tasks and the environmental affordances.”
- “Understanding the relations between these three factors and how individuals structure movement within this framework will lead to important understandings about the learning, performance, teaching, and rehabilitation of motor skills.”
What Is an Adaptive Zone and How Can It Be Designed in Practice Programs?
An adaptive zone is the practice time between the planned repetition of action in rehearsal and the unstructured exploration and discovery of performance solutions. In the adaptive zone, performers cannot become completely dependent on the information available in a performance environment to regulate their actions. This control strategy would result in them merely reacting to information from events. Nor can athletes perform completely independently of their surrounding environment (through a shared plan or performance model or by strictly adhering to previous coaching instructions) (Davids et al., 2015). With skilled performance analysis, opponents can understand and disrupt the best-prepared plans during competition. In the adaptive zone, actions of an individual athlete or sports team need to combine intentions, perception, and action in an emergent manner to take advantage of the information that emerges in performance and learning environments. In the adaptive zone, athletes can be encouraged to anticipate events and outcomes and attune to information that is most relevant for their task goals.
This type of adaptive capacity needs to be practiced in training and cannot simply be turned on and off at will.Practice designs need to place athletes into an adaptive zone during preparation for competition. For example, small-sided and conditioned games provide adaptive zones for learners to explore the relationships between key sources of information, and actions can be exploited by developing athletes. Data from existing research studies in ecological dynamics suggest that information variables emerging during ongoing interpersonal interactions of athletes (e.g., gap widths, angular relations, relative velocities, and interpersonal distances in team games) provide affordances (they invite certain opportunities for action) that can be used by players and explored during practice. Adaptive zones should provide rich and varied fields of affordances from the available landscape (Davids, Renshaw, Pinder, Greenwood, and Barris, 2016).
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