The Role of Cognition in Ecological Dynamics (short summary)

This blog builds on ideas that emerged in a detailed discussion on cognition considered from an ecological dynamics perspective. The speakers, Ian Renshaw, Keith Davids and Duarte Araujo, explored some misconceptions surrounding cognition's role in ecological dynamics, and the way that it is intertwined with perception and action. This blog also considers implications of these ideas for understanding sports performance, as well as knock-on effects for coaching and practice design.

1. Cognition and Ecological Dynamics: In ecological dynamics, cognition is not a separate, internalised, mental process, but is instead deeply embedded in our continuous transactions with the environment.

Ecological dynamics emphasizes a view of cognition that is more about doing (acting and perceiving) — focusing on how individuals adapt their behaviour in dynamic performance contexts. This idea of cognition is well aligned with the notion of skill adaptation, suggesting it as a way for performers in sport to engage with a performance environment.

2. Intelligent Performance: An intelligent performer utilizes their entire body, not just their mind, to navigate performance challenges, simple and complex. They become skilled at picking up relevant information from their surrounds, using it to make decisions, adapt their actions and solve problems contextually. They use this type of performance intelligence, rather than relying solely on pre-stored knowledge or instructions or carrying out pre-determined solutions provided by a parent, teacher or coach.

3. Coaching Implications: Coaches are encouraged to foster athletes' autonomy and intelligent performance by helping them become better problem solvers, coping well with responsibility and making decisions, and emphasizing knowledge of the environment over mere knowledge about techniques. Skill adaptation supports athletes in engaging with meaningful transactions (exchanges) with a performance environment.

4. Philosophical Underpinnings: The conversation draws attention to historical philosophical biases (like dualism) that have shaped contemporary thinking and understanding within sports psychology, pointing out that many approaches to training and assessment still reflect these outdated frameworks.

Ecological dynamics criticises the metatheoretical (underlying philosophical) assumption in cognitive theories that the organism and environment are logically distinct. This historical assumption, traced back to the philosophical accounts of human experience in ancient Greece (e.g., idealism of the mind by Plato and Socrates) is the separation of mind from body.

5. The dualism between mind and body facilitates a science of psychology that is mostly separated from the biophysical sciences. In fact, the metatheory of traditional psychology (trait and interactionism), ignores scientific input from physics and ecology regarding how energy patterns in the environment are used by performers to influence and guide how they act.

6. Practical Applications: This discussion leads to suggestion that training environments should be designed to mimic the unpredictability of real performance situations, providing many opportunities for perceptual and decision-making experiences that lead to more effective problem-solving.

7. A good starting point would be to adopt the four Environmental Design principles put forward by Renshaw et al., (2019), proposed to build the bridge between the theoretical ideas of ecological dynamics and their practical application via a Constraint-Led Approach (CLA). The first principle is that coaches and their performers will determine the intention for the session, and then create a learning environment with a focus on the principle of Representative Learning Design. The aim is to carefully sample the information in the performance environment to create the conditions for the functional coupling of perception and action to emerge, in line with those seen in games or competition. Consequently, coaches will deliberately design-in affordances to provide opportunities for action. Coaches will then carefully consider how much variability they wish to have in the session using the principle of Repetition without Repetition. However, at times athletes are unable to see or take the opportunities available and this is the time to add in task constraints. This is the concept of constrain to afford, the final environmental design principles (Renshaw et al, 2019)

This conversation aims to better equip coaches, practitioners, and athletes with insights to improve performance by recognizing the importance of how cognition is intertwined with perception and action in real-world environments.

Reference

Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Newcombe, D., & Roberts, W. (2019). The constraints-led approach: Principles for sports coaching and practice design. Routledge.

Can coaches “pick & mix” ideas from different scientific theories to inform their practical applications?

Authors: Sam Hydes, Martyn Rothwell, David Farrokh & Keith Davids.

Decades ago, the psychologist Kurt Lewin shared the insight that: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (1943, p. 69). In a paper published in 2024, Phil Kearney and colleagues referred to a lovely quote from Jerome Bruner, the cognitive development psychologist, which highlighted the challenges in applying knowledge to resolve practical issues: ‘Thoughtful people have forever been troubled by the enigma of applying theoretical knowledge to practical problems’. (Bruner, 1996, p. 44).

Most practitioners in sport and education would recognise these sentiments, especially those who place great emphasis on the importance of using a scientific, evidence-based approach in their work. Scientific knowledge from research on performance, learning and development remains a significant source of information that underpins pedagogical practice in training and education. As noted by Kearney and co-authors in their 2024 article: It’s difficult to apply scientific ideas of human behaviour in practice! It is especially challenging to understand and control what is going on during the complicated learning process in sport, work and other performance contexts.

Why practitioners need a useful theory to guide their professional practice

Jia Yi Chow and colleagues remind us that, to make sense of practical activities, implement effective organisation and make efficient use of time, coaches, teachers and sport practitioners need to rely on a model of the learner and the learning process.

Many practitioners already work with a theoretical model of the learner and the learning process. And while they may be broadly happy with their work, they may have some nagging questions at the back of their mind, such as:

How do I know whether the coaching practices I use are as effective as they could be?

What information can I use to make decisions on improving and refining my practice?

These are fundamental issues to be considered by practitioners who are reflective, science-oriented and evidence-based in their practice, seeking to use the most contemporary theoretical ideas and up-to-date pedagogical ideas for their practice.

Of course, scientific knowledge is not the only useful source of evidence and information that practitioners may use in their work. Useful ideas come from different sources. For example, another source may emerge from the experiential knowledge gained from practitioners’ everyday experiences of working with athletes and teams, when designing learning activities. For example, experiential knowledge can arise from observing other coaches and sports scientists at work, listening to podcasts or reading about the ideas of experienced practitioners in sport, as Alex Lascu and co-workers and Matt Wood and colleagues noted in their articles on coach education from an ecological perspective.

Figure 1 shows how a confluence of empirical knowledge from science and experiential knowledge from everyday practice provides a rich body of information and ideas to guide the practice of those in education and training.

The insights of Lewin and Bruner remind us about the value of applying theoretically sound ideas in practice, and the questions arise, then:

How do we distinguish between a useful and less useful theory?

What if the choice of theory is not so clear and we happen to like the idea of applying some ideas from different theories in our pedagogical methods?

Are all theories compatible with each other?

This post is about whether coaches, educators and trainers can selectively choose different bits and pieces from different scientific theories and integrate them together, regardless of their origin, to underpin professional practice when developing athletes and preparing individuals and teams for competitive performance in sport.

In fact, in a Delphi survey conducted by one of the authors of this blog (SH) participants responded to the following comments:

Factors relating to training and performance methodology

Common principles may be hard to develop due to different philosophical and theoretical positions. Agreement

Common principles may be easier to develop once there is an understanding and appreciation of different philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Agreement

Collaborative practice design would mean that disciplines have to “step outside” of their philosophical, theoretical, and applied beliefs. No consensus reached (66% agreement)

Collaborative practice design should be aligned to a single methodology of athlete development. Disagreement

Disciplinary perspectives may not always agree on the best course of action for athlete preparation. Agreement

The Delphi survey findings highlighted a fascinating paradox: high-performance coaches and support staff expressed reservations about being aligned to a single theory and methodology for athlete development.

The issue raised for comment in the Delphi study was: “Collaborative practice should not be aligned to a single methodology of athlete development”.

However, respondents also acknowledged the difficulty of establishing common principles of practice due to diverse philosophies, theoretical perspectives, and disagreements within sub-disciplines regarding what may be an ‘optimal’ approach in athlete preparation and performance.

This is what we try to unravel in this blog post.

In professional practice, this logical train of thinking leads us to ponder:

Do practitioners have to compare and contrast theories to work out which ones to use in supporting our practical work? Can they simply pick the ‘best’ bits from different theories and mix them up together in our work? Can they just adopt what has been called a ‘complementary’ approach which is based on the idea of picking specific bits (ideas, concepts, models) from different theories and creating a new integrated whole?

In fact, it’s very rare that complementarity between two philosophically and scientifically distinct positions ever emerges as we outline in this blog. This is not just philosophical contemplation on our part.

Academic Perspective: Why we can’t just ‘pick & mix’ between some theories

We start by acknowledging that there may be some practitioners who only rely on their experiential knowledge in designing athlete support programmes for performance, learning and development (e.g., those methods which they have gained through experience, which they trust and have seen to work in practice). Here, we discuss the challenge of creating a principled approach to coaching and providing professional support which is claimed to be driven by scientific evidence and ideas on performance, learning and development.

Different schools of thought in psychology

There are two main schools of thought in psychology regarding motor learning and skill acquisition: Cognitive Psychology and Ecological Dynamics. These schools are composed of families of closely-related theories.

(i) For example, cognitive psychology has several strands, such as cognitive neuroscience, enactivism, embedded cognition and embodied cognition;

(ii) Ecological Dynamics is influenced by ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, complex systems theory, evolutionary sciences and neurobiology.

In this post, we don’t intend to get into deep details regarding the variants of these families of theories. Rather, we focus on differences in their foundational beliefs which challenge the integration of theoretical ideas from the two different schools of thought in psychology. In simpler terms: Why a ‘pick & mix’ approach is not a good idea.

It is worth starting with a brief look at the history of the different philosophical and scientific lineages of cognitive psychology and ecological dynamics theory. This distinction is used as an example to show why a deeper understanding of the philosophical foundations that underpin all scientific approaches to performance, learning and development, could improve practical applications of coaches and teachers. Diving deeper to understand the background to the different theories of performance, learning and development could prevent misconceptions, misunderstanding and misapplication by coaches.

Some sport practitioners may be dismayed at the complications of having two schools of thought to choose from, providing different theoretical explanations for the same outcomes. A good example of this can be seen in a commentary by Carl Woods and colleagues in the journal Psychological Research, pointing out a different way to interpret data from an experiment outlining the role of cognitive maps in finding our way around the environment.

But another way of looking at the range of different theoretical perspectives is that it’s actually a sign of a vibrant and healthy scientific sub-discipline (motor learning) in a rich scientific discipline (psychology). The rapid growth in scientific knowledge, theoretical explanations of behaviour and methodologies has led to more specialised research to enhance our understanding in motor learning, skill acquisition, performance analysis and psychology of performance.

The different schools of thought in psychology have distinct metatheoretical foundations

We start by recognising that every theory in science has some important assumptions and commitments that we buy into, if we are intent on following its principles. The ecological psychologist, Harry Heft (2012, p12), clarified it for us: "A theoretical approach in a science can be viewed as belonging to a family of theories that share common meta-theoretical assumptions."

So, what we have called here a ‘school of thought’ in psychology is essentially a framework of interconnected principles, concepts and ideas for explaining human behaviours (like performance, learning and development).

Alert: Cognitive psychology and Ecological Dynamics have different metatheoretical foundations.

Meta-theoretical assumptions make up the philosophical beliefs and ideas about human existence and experience that underpin a theory of behaviour. Meta-theories support a way of viewing the world (or paradigm) that shapes our understanding of behaviours like performance, learning and development. Different scientific paradigms (ways of viewing the world) come with different conceptual frameworks, beliefs, underlying assumptions and sets of principles.

For example, meta-theoretical foundations are different for those theories which consider that our behaviour is significantly shaped by our genetic inheritance or by the environment which we are brought up in. These meta-theories have shaped the ‘nature v nurture’ debate that has haunted psychology for decades. In fact, science has a lot of ‘dualisms’ like these which pit different theories against each other (see Figure 2 showing some of the dualisms that have emerged in psychological science over the decades).

In a nutshell, when it comes to understanding performance, learning and development:

Some theories propose that humans construct internal models of the world in the brain and use mental processes to make sense of (i.e. enrich) the information that surrounds us (Cognitive Psychology).

In contrast, the work of The Constraints Collective is founded on an ecological dynamics rationale for performance, learning and development, based on the deep relationship that is formed between each organism (individual) and the performance environment, continually developed during learning and maturation.

So, different theories of movement, explaining control, coordination and skill acquisition (e.g., cognitive psychology and ecological psychology), have distinct philosophical and scientific underpinnings. As the eminent philosopher scientist, Alicia Juarrero noted, the historical and socio-cultural context in which a theory develops is important. Juarrero referred to the ‘apparent assumptions’ (assumed beliefs and values) that underpin theories. This is because these underlying assumptions are not immediately obvious to readers who are not familiar with the sciences and their meta-theories. For this reason, the developmental psychologist Willis Overton called these metatheoretical underpinnings in science ‘background concepts’, meaning that they may only come under the spotlight in discussions on the philosophy of science, not so much in everyday applications.

A theory is ‘silently’ shaped by influential philosophical ideas (metatheoretical foundations) that have dominated scientific thinking at a particular time in history and social context. In turn, the metatheories to which a theory of motor learning belongs, ‘silently’ shape practice application ideas because they come along with implicit assumptions and commitments to certain beliefs and ideas. These ‘apparent assumptions’ are not always made explicit in every paper on learning. And why they should they be? A published paper is usually focused on specific ideas and data from a research study. Word limits are strict and there is often little space available to repeatedly refer to the philosophical assumptions that underpin the ideas discussed in an article.

Key message: Think of the metatheory of an explanation of behaviour as the ‘small print of conditions’ for a scientific theory. Vitally important, but they lurk in the background and are not typically spotlighted in every publication. When authors write an article on a research study or a practice application to publish in a journal, they do not have the capacity to address the original philosophical foundations of these theories. In the case of cognitive psychology, this would need going back a millennium to the Greek philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, for example) for their musings on learning and practice for example. For ideas providing an ecological foundation, one can go back around 150 years or so.

These assumptions are usually left implicit and unspoken (at conferences, in papers and in podcasts). And, to be fair, some authors may not be fully acquainted with the meta-theoretical foundations of their favoured approach to human behaviours.

But, why do we need to be well acquainted with the ‘apparent assumptions’ of a metatheory? In the post, we are addressing the commitments to different psychological theories to discuss the Delphi findings we mentioned earlier.

Metatheories point to different models of the learner and the learning process

Clearly, this is not simply an ‘academic’ argument of practical irrelevance. As we discussed elsewhere: Those who need to understand how people learn (e.g., parents, educators, teachers, coaches, sport scientists, trainers, managers and performance analysts) need to have a model of the learner and the learning process in mind when it comes to designing practices.

This is needed (along with scientific updates and information on changes in technology, rules, and practice and performance conditions) to make the learning process more effective and efficient (not wasting learners’ time and efforts and making effective use of time spent learning).

The crux of the matter is that the foundational philosophical beliefs of one theoretical approach to skill acquisition, or another, has led to different ways of understanding: (i) how we should view the learner; and (ii), and what the process of learning actually entails.

Summary so far: Scientific ideas behind important human behaviours like performing, learning, developing and practising have specific philosophical foundations which imply assumed beliefs, understandings and values. These meta-theoretical assumptions are implicit and differ between theories. Metatheories have different philosophical foundations and can help us to develop a meaningful model of the learner and the learning process to provide us with a set of concepts and guiding principles for understanding performance, learning and development.

Referring to metatheories can help us to avoid conceptual confusion and time wasted, pursuing less productive and less consequential ideas. They can help us differentiate between meaningful and meaningless scientific activities. Willis Overton suggested that some metatheories may be useful as metaphors in modelling our understanding of the world and how things work. For example, there are different metaphors at play when we think about theories conceiving human beings as a mechanistic, inanimate system (an input-output device: ‘the brain is a computer’) or as a biological organism (a dynamical entity, functioning in an eco-system).

The main scientific paradigms of human behaviour

Currently, it is generally agreed that there are 4 main scientific paradigms or worldviews of human behaviour, relevant for psychologists: trait, interactionist, organismic and relational. Trait and interactionist meta-theories are traditionally dominant paradigms in the history of psychology, while the organismic and relational worldviews are more recent additions to this group.

The interactionist and trait meta-theories pay close attention to the internal characteristics, traits and properties of an individual person as the main units of analysis for understanding behaviour. Each person is considered to be an independent, self-contained entity, with specific dispositions and tendencies, independent of the environment. In this sense, each individual has essential traits and characteristics which helps them function as semi-independent, bounded units continually interacting with other entities (e.g., other humans, objects, forms and bodies) which inhabit the environment.

Interactionism views humans as autonomous individuals acting independently in the environment. In this way of thinking, interactions between humans are likened to the collisions between a bunch of snooker or billiard balls whose trajectories in space and time can be calculated, predicted with precision, as they impact on each other, coming together (interacting) in the environment. There are parallels with linear, mechanistic accounts in the physics of clockwork interactions between entities and objects in the universe, originally developed by Sir Isaac Newton after a mythical encounter with an apple falling from a tree under the force of gravity. In physics this interaction has been captured by the concept of ‘action-reaction’. As with other theoretical accounts of human behaviour, these mechanistic ideas became prominent in psychological explanations.

In psychology, Réné Descartes was a main proponent of such an interactionist account of human behaviour. Cartesian psychology is dualist in philosophical foundation, which views the mind and body as separate parts of a human being. Each individual is viewed as autonomous, with behaviour produced from independent traits and mental capacities, such as unique memories and internal representations which help us to develop knowledge about our world. Our behaviour is controlled by this information located within internal mechanisms and processed by the mind. Although each individual has the capacity for autonomous tendencies to regulate their behaviour, they are continually impacted by interactions with other individuals, events and objects in the environment.

Key message: Interactionism views the individual and the environment as semi-autonomous, separate entities which can impact on each other through interactions.

To exemplify, one can see the essentials of interactionist metatheoretical ideas in the psychological theory of behaviourism, captured in the stimulus-response relationship, as well as in information processing accounts of behaviour. Behaviour in these theoretical approaches is somewhat mechanistic and linear. Furthermore, the person or the environment can each provide an explanation for behaviour separately and independently of each other. That is, interactionist accounts of human behaviour may rely on describing what happens in a person (cognitive psychology) or in the environment (behaviourism). Events and outcomes can be explained either by what is going on in the environment or what is going on in an individual.

In such trait and interactionist theories, the standard approach to understanding perception, cognition and action is to start with the senses (vision, touch, hearing, feeling, etc), not by investigating relations of a perceiver and the surrounding context.  For example, in trait theories the focus is on a sensory receptor, a mental process or a gene for fast cognition or super visual abilities.

Figure 3: It’s all in your mind!: An example of an interactionist approach to supporting athletes in performance development and preparation focuses on internal properties or characteristics of an individual athlete:

Summary: Interactionism is dualist in philosophical foundation, with the mind leading the physical ‘machinery’ of the body. Learning and development is concerned with enriching the mental capacities of each individual, for making sense of their surrounds and for steering their interactions with the environment. Enrichment processes include the construction of mental maps and internal route finders for guidance, relying on models of movement and the world constructed internally, encoded and stored as universal types, tokens and kinds for knowledge, recognition and awareness of our world (as Plato argued).

In contrast to the above, organismic and relational accounts of human behaviour form the meta-theoretical foundations of ecological approaches to human behaviour. Relational accounts stress the deep interconnections of an organism and its environment: each cannot be understood apart from each other. Attention is focused on the relationships that emerge from the continuous transactions (exchanges) between humans and the environment, forming a highly interconnected, complex adaptive system. Coordination is a fundamentally important process of relational systems to study, as scientists like Scott Kelso have argued for many years.

Why use the specific word transactions in describing the relations between an individual and the surrounding environment in which they are embedded?

Here, its useful to consider a quote from an important book by Peter Kugler and Michael Turvey written a few decades ago. They noted that:

“Ecological Science, in its broadest sense, is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of living systems, their environments and the reciprocity that has evolved between the two....Ecological Psychology....[emphasizes] the study of information transactions between living systems and their environments, especially as they pertain to perceiving situations of significance to planning and executing of purposes activated in an environment” (Kugler & Turvey, 1987, p. xii).

We like this quote a lot for several reasons. But here we pick up on just two points:

First, the quote draws the links between ecology as a science explaining phenomena in the natural physical world and ecological psychology as a theory for framing the study of human behaviour.

Second, it is useful for understanding analyses of transactions between individuals and their surrounds, because it clarifies that these transactions involve information exchanges. These transactions between humans and their environment involve energy exchanges during cognition, perception and actions. The use of the word 'purposes' highlights the importance of intentions in framing what we perceive and how we act.

The idea that transactional exchanges between people and their surroundings form the basis of human behaviours aligns well with James Gibson’s insight on the importance of coupling perception and action in skilled performance: “We perceive in order to act and we act in order to perceive” (p223). In his theory of ecological optics James Gibson focused on how surrounding energy could furnish information to be picked up by an individual using active perception and selecting affordances for action.

This is possible because ecological systems are highly attuned to information, flowing in and around them, emerging over different timescales. In such highly interconnected systems, information and time are key stimulants of the transactional relations that emerge as people engage with their environment. Our actions are solicited by information from the environment. For example, information is available as affordances which invite our actions. Information is also used within such complex systems to communicate between parts, regulating transactions through energy exchanges, supporting self-organisation (continuous adjustments that emerge spontaneously, under constraint). Time is an essential property of ecological systems of all types, which is neglected in cognitive models of human behaviour. This is because the interconnections and relations between ecological system components are changing at many different timescales. For this reason, evolutionary biological and socio-historical and cultural constraints shaping such systems are so important to study because of the history of the relations between system components which support their inter-connectivity.

Many elements of ecological systems provide the capacity to adjust their behaviours, relative to each other, exploiting inherent self-organising tendencies which underpin their transactions (exchanges) with the environment. According to Piaget, in a sophisticated biological process, this is how one’s skill and knowledge gradually can become adapted to a wide variety of behavioural contexts. As Alicia Juarrero noted in her 2023 book, context means everything in the constant process of adaptation. Affordances (behavioural opportunities available in the environment) support functional adaptation to dynamic performance environments. These ideas are diametrically opposed to control and order appearing through automatisation of machine-like behaviours in humans viewed as input-output devices.

Where did relational ideas originate?

The move towards relativistic, relational process thinking, originating in the late 1800s in American pragmatism in philosophy, facilitated a transition from elemental and reductive, structural philosophical positions (focusing on breaking things down into parts rather than study them as systems). The next step was the growth of a systems orientation in science, for viewing how things are deeply interconnected, exchanging energy and information between each other. Science became less focused on producing established truths that are fixed, settling on understanding the relations within natural physical systems that emerge through an organism’s transactions with the dynamic environment over time.

From the 1800s onwards, ‘complexity’ and relational thinking became more popular in physics, chemistry and biology, but remained less influential in psychology. This was when the influence of time in scientific theories started to raise questions over the powerful influence of Greek philosophical ideals. The dominant mechanistic, interactionist view of the clockwork universe and world started to concede ground to ecological and evolutionary ideas with time-based ideas on how systems become more and more interconnected. For example, these ideas framed the broad conceptualisation of evolution in science by Charles Darwin and others. Eventually, this movement if you want to call it that, leaked into psychology due to the integrated influence of ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, complexity sciences, and ecological dynamics. Ecological psychology emerged due to the influence of James Gibson, starting in the 1950s onwards. He initiated the drive for understanding the within-level and between-level connectivity processes which characterise ecological systems. Over the decades, this has been hard work for ecological psychology due to the dominance of trait-based and interactionist meta theories which propose mechanistic and mentalistic perspectives of behaviour.

So, there you have a brief description of the historical foundations of distinct meta-theories underpinning cognitive psychology (interactionism) and ecological dynamics (transactionalism).

By now some threads should be emerging, taking us back to our original question:

Can sport practitioners ‘pick & mix’ (cherry pick ideas) in developing a scientifically-supported approach to understanding performance, learning and development?

Following the main arguments in the discussion, it should be clearer why using a ‘pick & mix’ approach to coaching methodology is not coherent and logical, if a scientific approach is being followed. The philosophical foundations of the main psychological approaches come from different start points in the history of scientific ideas and their trajectories have run along parallel lines ever since. Next, we outline what these ideas might mean for coaches and sport scientists.

Coaches’ Perspective

Referring to the nagging questions posed at the start of this blog:

What are the key principles I am using to design my practice and why am I using them?

How do I know whether the coaching practices I use are as effective as they could be?

What information can I use to make decisions on improving and refining my practice?

To highlight some of the challenges inherent in a pick and mix approach, we present two examples: an invasion game and an individual sport.  

Example 1: The challenge of using a pick and mix approach to developing attacking play in an invasion sport

To demonstrate the challenge of using a pick and mix approach from an applied perspective, we present a recent experience of observing an invasion sport team trying to develop attacking play through a shared mental model (interactionism) and game scenarios (transactionalism). The observed team was trying to develop a new approach to executing attacking phases of play during preseason. The coaching support staff prioritised methods to develop knowledge about the environment (information to detail competitive plays and actions) through video analysis, team tactics boards, and discussions about how players should collectively behave in certain attacking scenarios. Through this approach, the coaching team held the assumption that labelling and categorising actions to carry out in the game, in certain positions, and at certain time points, was the basis of sport performance. The aim of this approach was to develop shared mental models to inform players’ knowledge about the environment.

In one such example, during a 90-minute coaching session, the team spent 50 minutes developing knowledge about the environment through a video analysis session, using verbal instructions and feedback. Following the transition to the training pitch, they had approximately 30 minutes remaining to rehearse attacking scenarios, based on the previously discussed information. This training approach became the standard method for developing collective attacking team play. Observations of this approach highlighted several challenges which affected advances in learning and performance. For example:

1. Even after several weeks of adopting this approach, players’ interpretations of what, when, and how they should be acting in specific situations were quite different. These confusions resulted in arguments between the players, coaches becoming increasingly frustrated, and ineffective attacking playing.

2. Practice became focused on past performance (what went wrong) in training and preseason games, rather than guiding players’ attention to present challenges for refining future performance. In other words, the performance programme overemphasised past issues and problems, rather than focusing on immediate challenges facing the players.

3. Players became over reliant on the coaches’ instructions, and knowledge about the environment, to guide their performance.

4. Overtime this increasing reliance led to players ignoring key specifying information sources that emerged during play as knowledge of the environment (e.g., individual and team defensive actions) that would ultimately guide their behaviour during competitive performance. In competition, information specifies actions and actions create further information, making affordances (invitations for action) available in the surrounding context.

This example demonstrates that when coaches and the wider multidisciplinary team unknowingly move between models of the learner and the learning process. Here, a cognitive approach preferencing verbal and visual information to guide players in accruing knowledge about the environment impeded their transactions with the performance environment, founded on knowledge of the competitive context. This clash between methods of preparation and what arose from players due to challenges of competition led to issues in learning and performance. Whatever a coach’s theoretical persuasion is, a clear model of the learning process should be communicated to guide learning designs within team environments. As already discussed, this is an important step to take in order not to confuse the learning process, and to enhance performance more effectively and efficiently. 

Example 2: Differences in approaches within Springboard Diving

The images in Figure 4 below show a diver performing a forward one and a half somersault addressing a performance challenge of landing too far away from the springboard. We have captured some critical time points (e.g., last point of contact with the springboard) to show how the diver is positioned and how they perform the dive. 

Figures 5 and 6 below, discuss a cognitive approach to practice and an ecological approach, (manipulating task constraints to help the diver search for a functional performance solution). The aim of practice is to resolve the performance problem of entering the water too far away from the diving board (resulting in trailing legs and too much splash).

A cognitive approach

Figure 5 shows a diver performing a forward jump with pike. Typically, in springboard diving, coaches would seek to explicitly instruct the diver how to solve the performance problem by breaking the skill down (task decomposition) into component parts. This approach often relies heavily on the coaches’ knowledge about the performance environment, which defines the verbal instructions, visual demonstrations, descriptions and feedback used to oversee the diver’s learning. The diver will be challenged to demonstrate improved balance and distance jumped from the diving board by isolating the take-off component for practice. The aim is to develop technical proficiency in one sub-component of the movement at a time (to ‘polish’ each sub-routine separately, in a reductive approach. The aim is to manage the information load for the athlete and help them to acquire substantive mental representations of the dive through learning. The decomposition approach helps them to refine optimal techniques until the performer can execute the motor skill efficiently and reliably. With this newly acquired template, the diver will be challenged to integrate it into the original dive, a forward one and a half somersault piked. By decomposing the dive into smaller parts, the information load on the diver is reduced, but this causes the diver to address the environment in practice in a different way (e.g., orienting the body in space in a different way to comply with the coach’s instructions). Figure 5 illustrates the diver’s body positioning at various key moments within the dive action. As you can see, the jump requires the diver to coordinate their movement differently compared to a rotating dive. The diver’s arm swing timing, while depressing the board is altered, and the legs, hips, and torso remain rather too vertically upright to prevent rotation. The issue with this approach is that the dives that the diver is performing require the adaptation to variability which may emerge from each technique sub-component to resolve the overall performance problem of improving distance jumped from the diving board.

An ecological dynamics approach

In contrast, Figure 6 below, shows the outcome of adopting an ecological approach to facilitate improved balance on the diving board and postural orientation in space while diving. Using a constraints-led approach, the unobtrusive placement of a chamois in the pool encourages the diver to explore and discover different ways to address the environment seeking an individualised performance solution. A task constraint (a boundary or limitation, or design feature that influences how a performer can achieve a desired task goal) is introduced on the water surface (in the form of a chamois cloth) to guide the diver’s intentions and provide a performance goal of “land on or before the chamois”. The diver is also guided to attend to the chamois and find a relevant, individualised movement solution to achieve the performance goal. Specifically, the added information made available in the environment helps guide the diver (using ‘repetition without repetition’; Bernstein, 1967) to search for a better alignment of the body vertically, and to seek improved timing of the arm swing to facilitate effective body rotation in the air. By satisfying this task constraint (landing on the spot in the pool highlighted by the chamois), divers will learn to attune to specifying properties of the relevant affordance within their environment through engaging with the practice task constraints. Gradually, the chamois can be removed from the practice environment, and the diver will learn to use a spot on the surface of the pool to target instead.

Summary

It could be useful for coaches to ‘dive deeper’ and start to frame their coaching around a theoretical framework of learning from science. This will provide understanding of a coherent set of scientific principles for their work and help them resolve any questions that may arise, avoiding misunderstandings. It will help them make sense of the evidence they come across in an applied scientific paper they may read and help them locate the ‘apparent assumptions’ of the researchers behind a particular application of performance, learning, and development.

There is a lack of deep understanding of different theories of performance, learning and development for coaching. To address this limitation, coaches, researchers, practitioners, academics, and coach education need to work together to facilitate effective knowledge transfer.

Of course, a coach or teacher is entitled to use an atheoretical approach to coaching, based on knowledge of a non-scientific kind. This type of knowledge may be based on observing and imitating what other coaches do in practice or may be based on their own experiences on how they were coached themselves (as ex-athletes for example). This type of understanding is explicitly founded on their ‘experiential knowledge’, gained from personal insights and experiences.

Regardless of how a coach approaches their professional practice, it is important for them to have a model of the learner and the learning process to guide them, especially as the framework for coaching and teaching a sport or physical activity is constantly changing (due to technological and equipment advances, changes in format, new rules and new ideas, for example).

If you want to dive deeper into some further reading, see:

Altman, I., & Rogoff, B. (1987). World views in psychology: Trait, interactional, organismic, and transactional perspective. In D. Stokols, & I. Altman (Eds.), Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 7-40). New York: John Wiley.

Davids, K., Rothwell, M., Hydes, S., Robinson, T., & Davids, C. (2023). Enriching Athlete—Environment Interactions in Youth Sport: The Role of a Department of Methodology. Children, 10(4), 752.

Heft, H. (2012). Foundations of an ecological approach to Psychology. In S. D. Clayton (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology (pp. 11-40). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kugler, P.N., & Turvey, M.T. (1987). Information, natural law and the self-assembly of rhythmic movement. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. MIT Press: Cambridge, Ma.

Overton, W. (2013). Relationism and Relational Developmental Systems: A Paradigm for Developmental Science in the Post-Cartesian Era. Advances in Child Development and Behaviour 44, 21-64.

Woods, C., Araújo, D & Davids, K. (2024) On finding one’s way: A comment on “The structure of cognitive strategies for wayfinding decisions” – Bock, O., Huang, J.-Y., Onur, O & Memmert, D. (2024). Psychological Research: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-02011-1

Origins of the Constraint-Led Approach

Karl Newell (1986) Constraints on the Development of Co-ordination” in M. G. Wade, & H. T. A. Whiting’s book; Motor Development in Children: Aspects of Coordination and Control.

Aims:

This impactful publication was a chapter that was originally targeted at a motor development readership, but it quickly became clear that it was relevant for understanding coordination in different contexts including motor learning for sport performance. It had clear aims:

1.              To show that by considering the role of constraints on co-ordination, researchers’ could test the utility of contrasting theoretical models that were prevalent at that time.

2.              To propose that the constraints approach could give researchers interested in movement coordination an opportunity to bring together motor development and motor learning theories. This integration of theoretical ideas on motor development and learning was an important challenge that Karl Newell and his group of PhD students took on in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was because there were separate theories to explain motor development in children and how they learned to move.

 

Newell and colleagues were convinced of the importance of providing one common theoretical model to explain acquisition in all categories of co-ordination, captured in this book chapter:

 

Newell, K. M., & van Emmerik, R. E. A. (1990). Are Gesell's developmental principles general principles for the acquisition of coordination. In J. E. Clark & J. H. Humphrey (Eds.), Advances in motor development research (Vol. 3), (pp. 143-164). New York: AMS Press.

 

 

Background to the paper

Newell’s decision to publish his treatise on constraints in a book on motor development, rather than motor learning or motor control, is significant since at that time, the only research that had truly focused on co-ordination of behaviour had been within the field of motor development. That was because of the over-emphasis on motor control and learning in the dominant theories at that time, despite the fact the Nikolai Bernstein (1967) had focused attention on understanding coordination of the many different parts of the body decades before.

 

Also, for many practitioners working with children and youth it is confusing as to what actions and skill should be classed as belonging to motor development or motor learning. What are the differences proposed between motor development and motor learning?

Here are some standard definitions from previous texts:      

Motor Development: The sequential, continuous age-related process whereby movement behaviour changes (Haywood & Getchell, 2005). Continuous change in motor behaviour throughout the life cycle, brought about by interaction among the requirements of the movement task, the biology of the individual and the condition of the environment (Gallahue & Ozman, 2006).

Motor Learning: Refers to the relatively permanent gains in motor skill capability associated with practice or experience (Schmidt & Lee, 1999).

Motor Control: The study of the neural, physical, and behavioral aspects of movement (Schmidt & Lee, 1999).

Like Newell, for skill acquisition specialists interested in understanding the processes underpinning co-ordination of human movement, studying those at the beginning of their movement journey, that is infants, would seem to be an obvious place to start. However, up until recently, the basic movement patterns, categorised as phylogenetic skills, that we tend to associate with infant motor behaviors, such as, reaching, grasping, rolling, crawling, sitting, standing and walking have been conceptualised as different to more specialist skills needed for sport performance (i.e., ontogenetic skills) such as kicking a ball, hitting or throwing a ball or implement, gymnastics or athletics skills, or individual pursuit skills such as canoeing or climbing. An interesting question is: Why the distinction?

The distinction between co-ordination and skill:

Nikolai Bernstein (1967) emphasised the importance understanding how we learn to continually re-organised body parts (he termed ‘degrees of freedom’: muscles, joints, limbs, and more) to achieve our intended movement goals, such as maintain balance on a mountain surface using all four limbs or intercept a moving ball. Later Peter Kugler defined Co-ordination as: the function that constrains the potentially free variables into a behavioural unit.

Skill is the optional parameterization of this [coordination] function.

(Kugler et al. 1980)

Essentially, it was long believed that movement skills of infants were down to maturation and occur naturally, and simply down to (motor) development. In contrast, the other category included movements, classed as ontogenetic actions, had to be specifically learned-hence categorised under motor learning. What evidence is there to suggest that the two classes of activities emerge through different processes? One potential reason is that given that ‘everyone’ with normal development is capable of all of the basic patterns of co-ordination, but not everyone can perform specific ontogenetic actions, then these basic patterns must be learned by repetitive programming resulting in a set of internalised instructions. In contrast, phylogenetic movements were thought to appear through prescriptions embedded in the genetic make-up of each individual, appearing in a standard development sequence beginning within the uterus and onwards into infancy and childhood. Consequently, these phylogenetic movements are likely to appear in sequence, irrespective of the experiences of the individual, with delays or lack of appearance being designated as a developmental disorder. Evidence from studies (prior to the 1980s) seemed to support this view, even though most of our understanding came from work undertaken over 40-50 years earlier by the likes of Gesell (1929), McGraw (1943) and Shirley (1931). These studies were meticulous in their observations and analyses but were mainly descriptive in nature revealing that fundamental movement and posture patterns occur via a progressive ordered and regular sequence of stages of motor development. For example, Shirley (1931) observed 25 infants and identified five sequential stages in the development of “upright” locomotion. Similarly, McGraw (1943) categorised seven stages of progression from birth to normal gait. Arnold Gesell reported observing 23 different stages of infant behaviours playing with ‘rattles’. Thus, the finding that basic movement patterns follow an invariant and universal sequence appears to show strong support for the maturational view of motor development.  Over time this assumption has come under question due to research that demonstrated the nonlinearity and variability of maturation and typical motor development, exemplified by work of Linda Smith and Esther Thelen in the 1990s.

 

See: Smith, L. B. & Thelen, E. (Eds.) (1993). A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development - Applications. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

 

 

Thelen, E. & Smith, L.B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

 

In his work spread over 30 years, Gesell proposed that maturational perspective which is generally taken to refer to the specific patterns of co-ordination exhibited in early childhood is characterised by (i) the appearance of new behaviours without practice (ii) consistency in these new patterns of behaviour across subjects within the same species and (iii) an orderly and invariant sequence in the development of these behaviours.

(Taken from Adolph & Rachwani, 2018)

One point worth noting before we move on is that biological factors were acknowledged by Gesell as being important in the emergence of ontogenetic skills; however, in reality they have been down played in maturational theory.

 

So, if maturational development processes could explain infant co-ordination, how could actions that need to be specifically acquired be explained? The answer is that in 1986 was: not very well. This was mainly due to motor learning research being limited in its study of co-ordination by its insistence on utilizing tasks in which participants used single degrees of freedom (one joint, digit or limb), or by requirements that participants needed to produce a co-ordination pattern on the first attempt. In effect, this approach meant that motor learning scientists were hampered by the experimental paradigms of dominant motor control theories and were not studying true co-ordination problems. Consequently, and perhaps understandably, for those interested in understanding how co-ordination emerged through learning, the ideas from motor development were very attractive. For example, Roberton (1982) mapped the invariant steps in throwing actions of children.

 

The emergence of cognitive science models of motor control and learning, such as Schmidt’s (1975) Schema theory, might have been thought to have superseded the maturational perspective. However, at the most fundamental level, the schema approach was still largely based on internal focus on symbolic knowledge structures in the form of representations in the brain prescribing actions.

 

The advent of cognitive models to explain motor skill development along with emerging evidence that in some instances individuals regressed to earlier less ‘progressive’ stages and in others there were omissions between stages, resulted in maturational perspective losing efficacy due to its failure to explain the processes underlying co-ordination. However, as Newell highlights in the paper, maturation theory is implicit in current (circa 1986) accounts of the development of co-ordination.

 

A final point before me move on, is that nowadays, due to the dominance of cognitive theories, emphasising top-down movement control models, we often see the terms motor development, motor learning and motor control used inter-changeably. This is a misunderstanding that spills over into coaching and teaching where performance and learning are sometimes confused.

                                                                                                                    

Co-ordinative structure theory

 

Scientific theory evolves through dissatisfaction with current explanations and falsification of testable hypotheses. This was where movement scientists were in 1980. Influenced by the ideas of Bernstein (1967) and dynamical systems in science, the time was ripe for attempting new explanations of coordination, and this gap was filled by advocates of co-ordinative structure theory:  Kugler, Turvey and Kelso (1980, 1982).  These authors proposed a new model that was framed in dynamics where they posed the question regarding how n information in the environment could be contextualized so that it is continuously co-ordinated with changes in an individual’s as skeleton-muscular dynamics, across different timescales of performance, learning and development, for example, those brought about by changes in  skeleto-muscular  dimensions (1982, p.5). Put simply, the question of interest for Kugler and colleagues was: how do individuals successfully co-ordinate their movements during periods of growth, when the scaling of a person’s dimensions change? 

Brief Aside: The fusion of key ideas of dynamical systems theory and ecological psychology was first mooted by Peter Kugler, Michael Turvey and Scott Kelso as a basis for understanding movement control and co-ordination positing that information and dynamics are complementary in complex systems. The term ecological dynamics emerged later (Araújo et al., 2006) and around the same time, William Warren proposed how to integrate perception-action coupling and dynamics of movement coordination.

 

See:

Araújo, D., Davids, K. & Hristovski, R. (2006). The ecological dynamics of decision making in sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 7, 653-676.

Warren, W. (2006). The dynamics of perception and action. Psychological Review 113 (2), 358–389.

Kugler and colleagues framed their answer in the context of Bernstein’s (1967) degrees of freedom problem. That is, how does one re-organise (co-ordinate and control) the 792 muscles and over 100 mobile joints to ‘construct’ movement patterns which function to achieve intended task goals? In this context we will class a functional movement as one that solves a movement problem. They proposed that the solution to any co-ordination problem is through a systematic linking of muscles in such a way that the ‘set’ of individual muscles used in a specific context (e.g. throwing a ball) is reduced to a much smaller set of muscle collectives, that are constrained to act as a single functional unit.  This obviously reduces the problem of coordinating so many muscles, limbs, segments and joints, which traditional cognitive models such motor programming and schema theory wrestled with. They termed these collectives co-ordinative structures that are temporally organized as a single, coherent unit intended to achieve a task goal such as reaching, stepping, intercepting, kicking and so on.

 

In the co-ordinative structures approach, the emergence of an optimal pattern of co-ordination is predicated on the capability of a biological system to self-organise components in response to the constraints imposed upon it (adapt and adjust as conditions change). To adapt and adjust precisely an organism needs information from within and from its surrounds. This information for self-organising system degrees of freedom comes from interacting constraints as Newell argued. The role of interacting constraints was, of course, the focus of Newell’s impactful treatise and we will specifically discuss how this model works in detail in the next blog.

 

One final point that is of value for contrasting the traditional approach and the ‘new’ co-ordinative structures approach is the notion that co-ordination patterns are only assembled temporarily. The value of temporally, or ‘softly’, assembling a co-ordinative structure, rather than hard-wiring it in into the brain as proposed in a motor programming model to enable them to be ‘run-off’ or reproduced later, makes sense as humans are complex highly adaptive systems which are dynamic in nature, with changes being the norm. This means that a co-ordinative structure has a shelf life and is only of value if conditions in the individual-environment system remains stable. However, when some aspect of the system changes (either immediately or more slowly) beyond a critical value (e.g., a change in leg strength for an infant, or the medium through which an child is invited to walk (hard (rocks), uneven (pebbles) or soft (sand) surfaces) the co-ordinative structure will become less functional and a new one needs to emerge to help the mover adapt to the new context. This is an important consideration for practitioners as it demonstrates that there is no need for highly repetitive practice attempts to attempt to hard wire specific co-ordination patterns. Soft-assembly requirements in all movement contexts require an emphasis on seeking stability of course, but mostly adaptations.

 

 Summary

When Newell published his paper, the traditional approach to motor development had not moved on too much from the decades-old maturational and normative-descriptive approaches and theories. Newell’s ideas emerged in the context of contrasting thinking that was prevalent at that time that centred on the relative contributions of nature and nurture in terms of movement skills. Essentially this approach suggested that some skills were simply due to maturation, whilst others had to be learned. Newell proposed that constraints could provide researchers with a vehicle to test the utility of the contrasting theoretical models as well as providing one common theoretical model to explain all types of co-ordination: for motor learning and development over the life course.

Welcome to the first blog post from The Constraints Collective

Well, isn’t this exciting! The starter’s gun has gone off and we are away.

….and they’re off.

So, lets get onto the introductions:

The Constraints Collective team is made up of Ian Renshaw, Keith Davids, Will Roberts and Danny Newcombe. The team have over 100 years of collective experience of teaching, researching, coaching and working with colleagues in bringing to life the ideas of ED and CLA. We have an extensive network of friends and colleagues who are working in this space and at times we will post invited contributions from our ‘associates’ working in the area.

You can find out more about each of us by clicking the link below

Mission

“THE home for those interested in learning more about Constraint-Led Approaches (CLA) in education, science, exercise and coaching.”

First of all, thank you for visiting the website, we hope you find it interesting, informative and fun! We also hope you get involved and help us grow interest and uptake of CLA across the world.

Our aim @TCC is to build a community to share a range of online and off-line resources, provide opportunities to collaborate, discuss ideas and provide forums to advance CLA practice.

We will provide contemporary commentaries with CLA links to current topics of interest in the news. We will help coaches connect and share ideas, providing examples of CLA practice in their own work.

We will invite coaches to co-create knowledge and understanding of how to apply CLA. We will talk to researchers and get them to explain how practitioners can incorporate the key findings into their work.

Co-creating

We will also be offering opportunities for you to take part in educational programmes as well as connecting with us to build your skill set or the skills of those who work with and for you. If you are a coach or Physical Education teacher, a coach educator, programme co-ordinator for schools or sports or a high performance manager interested in developing a transdisciplinary support team, we can tailor our work with you based on a flexible and adaptable approach to learning and development. More generally, over time, we will publish our own books, manuals and encourage others to become part of the project. We welcome connection from individuals, teams or organisations.

The blog will become a focal point of The Constraint Collective website and is the place where we will discuss current issues that we think you will be interested in and that of course, relate to Constraint-Led Approaches. We will begin by focussing on the ‘basics’ of a CLA as well as having regular features focussed on the links of a CLA to play, discussions with current coaches and practitioners using a CLA in their work.

A CLA Positive Environment

You should be aware that we are passionate advocates for CLA and we won’t be apologising for that.

We should also make clear that this site is for those interested in the ideas of CLA and who are interested in furthering their knowledge base on an academic level or who want to explore using CLA in their practise.

We WILL NOT be engaging in slanging matches with anyone; we simply don’t have enough energy :)

So, let’s get started…