The Development of Decision Making Skill in Sport: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective
🚀 Article in 3 Sentences
- They introduce Ecological Dynamics as a theoretical framework for studying decision making in sport and explain how learning from an Ecological point of view is becoming more sensitive to the specifying information in the environment
- The different stages of developing decision making skills in sport are discussed. These are exploration, stabilising and exploiting
- Implications for training decision making in sport are given
🤝Impressions
This was a really insightful paper and there was so much takeaways. Challenges many long held beliefs on the development of decision making. The inclusion of implications of training at the end of the paper meant there were insights for coaches to take from the paper.
👨🏫Who should read this?
There is quite a bit of theory discussed in the paper so I’d recommend reading the paper if you have a good understanding of Ecological Dynamics already.
🎾How Article will influence my coaching
- I’ll be more conscious of the different stages of decision making and making sure that I’m presenting the appropriate constraints for the level of performer.
- Thinking more about if the tasks that I’m designing are promoting the acquisition of expertise
- Explore what the best way to introduce tasks that involve inducing fatigue, pressure and altering emotional states would be
📃Takeaways for coaches
- Learning from an Ecological point of view is becoming more sensitive to the specifying information in the environment
- Accurate perception, action and decision-making are characteristics of expert performance in sport
- Two attributes of successful performers in sport- stability (attractors) and flexibility (fluctuations)
- Successful performers in sport need to be able to adapt their actions to the everchanging environments
- ”To make decisions is to direct a course of personal interactions with the environment towards a goal, and decisions emerge from this cyclical process of searching for information to act and acting to detect more information”
- The first step of the learning process is the education of intention, this initiates the process of exploring degrees of freedom
- Certain perceptions and actions are more functional in specific performance situations and with experience performers become better at choosing the more functional ones
- Intentions are constraints and they define what information variables are relevant in any moment.
- Through exploration the performers can learn to pick up the information that is specifying for a specific intention
- Perceptual attunement is the process of learning which information sources are ‘specifying’ in situations and when to attend to them.
- With practice players can learn to attend to the more specifying information in a variety of performance conditions
- Stabilising solutions, exploring the limits of these solutions and becoming more perceptually attuned are characteristics of the exploration phase
- It makes little sense to tell novices how experts make decisions or ask them to think like experts. Instead we should be organising practice activities that promote the acquisition of expertise. Teaching performers to learn like experts
- The key to developing better decision making skills is presenting relevant constraints during the three developmental phases of decision making
🥇Top Quotes
💡 Successful performers need to adapt their actions to dynamically shifting environments that characterise competitive sport
💡 In sport, a player’s expertise is only revealed in the consequences of movement and perception embedded in actions, as observable properties of the environment-actor system
💡 In sum, to make decisions is to direct a course of personal interactions with the environment towards a goal, and decisions emerge from this cyclical process of searching for information to act and acting to detect more information
💡 This argument implies that the first step for any learning process to occur is the “education of intention” (Jacobs & Michaels, 2002, 2007), which will initiate the process of exploring degrees of freedom.
💡 Exploration of what is available in a performance situation can reveal what environmental properties are informative in relation to a specific intention (Araújo et al., 2005
💡 The process of attending to more useful variables is referred to as the education of attention, or perceptual attunement (Gibson, 1966, 1979)
💡 Perceptual attunement is the process of learning which sources of information to attend to in which situations and when to attend to these variables
💡 The key to assisting performers in acquiring effective decision making behaviors exists in presenting the relevant constraints during the three different developmental phases in decision-making as discussed in the earlier sections
💡 The aim of training is to guide the athlete towards a state where he/she learns like an expert, where he/she can act to discover information to guide action, i.e., by exploring, discovering and exploiting intrinsic and transactional degrees of freedom for successful performance.
🔍Resources
Reference
Araujo, D., Davids, K., Chow, J., & Passos, P. (2009). The development of decision making skill in sport: an ecological dynamics perspective. Perspectives on cognition and action in sport, 157-169.
padelcreations.com
ReplyDeleteIn sports like tennis or paddle, decision-making is crucial, but so is having a well-maintained court. A good playing surface ensures fair and enjoyable matches, enhancing the overall sporting experience.