If you dive into the area of ecological psychology, one of the foundational concepts you will come across is individual - environment mutuality. This key idea highlights that we cannot consider human behaviour in isolation from the environment in which it lives. In other words: context is everything. As James Gibson (1986) makes clear, the environment surrounds and includes the individual and, therefore, provides the context for what information is available to be picked up and hence how the individual acts or behaves. And, of course, the mutuality of the individual and environment is predicated on the key point that each individual’s actions create information, which guide further actions….an indelible loop that supports performance, learning and development.

“Figure 1: The mobius strip represents the idea that the individual-environment is one system and is inextricably linked (image courtesy of @hanart.1 adapted from Vas et al, 2017).”

This continuous interaction emphasises that the topology (i.e., the way the parts of the system fit together) of the specific individual-environment (I-E) system leads to emergent transformations over time, within the framework of individual-environment mutuality. This means people cannot be passively shaped by the environment in which they are embedded. They have to actively engage and interact; using knowledge of the environment to vigorously negotiate their contexts (education, work, play, family, etc.). Importantly, the behaviour exhibited by the I-E system is “intrinsically functional” (Withagen & Michaels, 2005), because it is constantly seeking to improve and refine its interactions. This idea has important implications for practitioners working with individuals in sport, education and health settings.

Figure 2: The topology of the individual-environment system evolves over time as the individual interacts with the landscape of affordances that surround it. (Image courtesy of @hanart.1 adapted from Vas et al, 2017).

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Individual-Environment Mutuality in the context of Teaching and Coaching

Put another way, in the context of teaching and coaching, the specific environment in which an individual is asked to perform will shape the skills that they develop (Araújo et al., 2004). This important learning design principle includes their intentions, perceptions and actions. For example, if asked to dribble a ball around cones placed on the ground, the individual will typically look down to gain information from the cones in order to navigate successfully around them. Their speed is likely to be relatively uniform, as will the length of each touch made with similar force and with one or two parts of the foot. In contrast to this level of stability in the environment, if the player is asked to dribble around an area to move through a series of randomly placed gates where everyone else is dribbling, then the player will have to look up (at least some of the time) to make sure they avoid banging into other dribblers. Their touches will likely be more variable as they have to speed up and slow down, change direction and sometimes use different feet and parts of the feet to manipulate the ball to avoid collision with another dribbler the dense spaces.

When we think of what the environment is, most of us think of factors such as the weather or perhaps the terrain or surface on which we perform. We also think of the physical structures around us; the buildings, parks or specific performance contexts such as a stadium, the velodrome in cycling, the river or lake in the triathlon, or the fixtures of the performance environment such as the beam in gymnastics or goalposts and pitch markings in the football codes. However, James Gibson also points out that the environment consists of the people who surround you are often the most important information sources of the environment. Consequently, team-mates, opponents, teachers, coaches, loved ones, other spectators and officials provide affordances (i.e., opportunities for action) for the individual. For example, an unmarked team-mate that can be picked-up or spotted affords the option for a pass for a player with the ball in team sports. A fellow climber can provide safety by belaying, while a playing partner putting first can allow a golfer to “go to school” on their putt.

Teachers and coaches also create specific cultural constraints that shape athlete’s intentions, cognitions and emotions as well as the perception-action skills they develop. For example, a junior coach can create an environment that promotes exploration, encouraging risk taking and a fear-free environment where players have fun and develop intrinsic motivation and a lifelong love of sports. Alternately, they can emphasize winning at all costs by drilling players and create a fear of failure and an external motivational set that leads to early drop out.

Practitioners play an important role as they generally design learning environments. For example, an elite canoeing coach can manipulate the gate sequences in a fast-flowing river to provide opportunities to explore the affordances offered by specific water flows in the river. A teacher can modify a game of tennis so that it starts with ball catching and throwing activity, rather than hitting it with a racquet to help the youngsters to learn to see where the space is on the court and to throw the ball away from their opponent.

In games, it is also important to remember that a referee or umpire is an important component of the environment as they provide players with a framework that helps shape the way a game is played.

These examples show us how important it is to consider skill learning through the lens of individual-environment mutuality. Skills have a history and the environments that youngsters grow up in shape the sports they play as well as the way they play them. For example, there are countless examples of how informal childhood games have provided the foundation upon which expertise has emerged. We have written about a number of examples in our work and will discuss more specific examples in later blogs.

Skills have a history…the games and activities children take part in when they are growing up have a significant impact on the skills that emerge.

The need to learn skills in context means that the key information (in ecological psychology this type of information is known as specifying information), needs to be present in learning environments so that the individual has the opportunity to detect it. To that end, we don’t want a competitive game to be the first time we are exposed to this key information. To learn to attune to key information available in a performance environment, it needs to be present in the practice environment.

Figure 4: Learning to ride a bike on uneven, non-smooth surfaces requires adapting to the way the tyres interact with the terrain when it is dry or wet.

In essence, over time through experience and learning, skilled coupling of perception and action gradually becomes fine-tuned (Ingold, 2021; Woods et al., 2021). For example, for an individual to engage effectively with other individuals, events, surfaces and objects in the performance environment, available affordances for action need to be detectable and detected. The role of the teacher or coach is, therefore, to ensure the key information is ‘designed-in’ to the set task. The role of the learner is to learn to pick up these affordances that these specific environments offer them and then develop the ability to use them (Gibson & Pick, 2000).

Figure 5: The presence of a defender in basketball changes the time it takes a player to get the shot off and changes the trajectory of the ball flight (Gorman & Maloney, 2016)

Individual-Environment Interactions shape behaviour over time

As should be clear from our discussion above and the figures provided, the individual-environment system changes over time as an individual interacts with their world. This idea, that the individual and environment is inseparable as a deeply integrated system, is an important one for practitioners. It shows that learning takes place in development and will evolve to create functional relationships with the environment. This idea has a profound consequence for practice design, as we will discuss in later blogs.

Examples of how environments shape perception-action couplings

Examples of key information is obviously sport and activity specific, however, here we will share a few examples to illustrate our point. At the simplest level, practitioners can interpret these ideas by understanding that if we want performers or learners to learn to attune to, and eventually exploit, specific information sources then we simply need to expose them to performance environments.

If we want a youngster to learn to catch a high ball in extreme wind conditions, we need to find environments where there are strong winds. For those lucky enough to live near the coast hitting high catches on the beach often satisfies this goal.
A tennis player who plays in the French Open on clay and then moves on to play at Wimbledon must be given opportunities to play games on grass so they can re-calibrate their timing to adjust to the faster courts. It is likely, they will have to adapt their tactics too.

Take a look at Federer playing Nadal on this hybrid court: how would you adapt?

A golfer who is poor when playing in the wind, might change their tee time to the afternoon when the wind tends to be stronger.
When asked to play on a new surface such as a synthetic football pitch, players need to be given time to calibrate their actions to the affordances of the pitch. This would include working out the most appropriate footwear to use, how much force needs to be applied to a kick to make a cross field pass to a team-mate, or how far in front of a team mate the ball can be played.
In order to learn to use a two-finger hand hold, climbers need to be exposed to appropriate rock characteristics such as a narrow fissure between two pieces of rock.

The examples we could provide are, of course, endless and while practitioners may often be able to exploit natural environments, sometimes they may have to be a little more creative in their session design and think a little bit outside the box. We will explore other examples in future posts.

Summary

The aim of this post was to introduce the concept of individual-environment mutuality and highlight its importance for sport, health and education professionals. This deeply integrated relationship sets a foundation upon which to discuss many of the key ideas of nonlinear Pedagogy and a CLA. Perhaps the most important of these pedagogical ideas refer to the way we define skill (as a more functional and adaptive relationship between each individual and a performance environment), the stages of learning, representative learning design in practice, ‘repetition without repetition’, as well as attunement to information and affordances of a performance environment.

Figure adapted from: Vaz, D. V., Silva, P. L., Mancini, M. C., Carello, C., & Kinsella-Shaw, J. (2017). Towards an ecologically grounded functional practice in rehabilitation. Human Movement Science, 52, 117-132.

References

Ingold, T., & Kurttila, T. (2000). Perceiving the environment in Finnish Lapland. Body & society, 6(3-4), 183-196.

Gibson, J. J. (2014). The ecological approach to visual perception: classic edition. Psychology Press.

Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2000). An ecological approach to perceptual learning and development. Oxford University Press, USA.

Gorman, A.D. & Maloney, M.A. (2016). Representative design: Does the addition of a defender change the execution of a basketball shot? Psychology of Sport and Exercise, Volume 27, 2016, 112–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2016.08.003.

Withagen, R., & Michaels, C. F. (2005). On ecological conceptualizations of perceptual systems and action systems. Theory & Psychology, 15(5), 603-620.

Woods, C. T., Rudd, J., Gray, R., & Davids, K. (2021). Enskilment: An ecological-anthropological worldview of skill, learning and education in sport. Sports Medicine-Open, 7(1), 1-9.