When we think about and discuss ways to enhance player development we often jump straight to coaches/coaching…
“better coaches = better players”
However, an alternative starting point is to understand the learner and (influences on) learning of the perceptions~cognitions~actions required for a particular sport. This inevitably uncovers a multitude of interacting factors (across “time and place”) that will influence the quality of player development outcomes.
Clearly coaches/coaching is one of these influential factors. However, by broadening our minds to consider the entire (complex) system of player development we potentially increase the chances of positive outcomes. Starting with a narrow focus on coaching, often driven by a cause & effect belief between quality of coaching and quality of player development, may in fact limit the frequency of those positive outcomes.
Like many of my posts, the stimulus for this has been recent conversation & content that I have engaged with. This post provides a perspective that can be considered in relation to a couple of themes…
perpetual debate and discussion regarding “technique” & “decision making” – the training & progression of each, understanding how they relate to each other.
“decision making”/“brain training”/“cognition” becoming hot topics in sport with plenty of suggestions for testing and training it – usually off the pitch/court.
Ok, on with the show. Watch the video below from about 0:55 onwards….
The clips you see are good examples of decisions having to be made rapidly (on and off the ball) in a dynamic environment with continuous interactions between players and the ball. I would argue players/teams who can function well in these situations are most valuable/successful.
These situations provide context for the text below – some theory & research from Paul Cisek on decision making during interactive behaviour (this is inclusive of, but not specific to, sporting contexts). You will see that the distinction between technique and decision making, in terms of a discrete serial process of a decision first being made and then a “technique” executed to carry out the decision, is brought into question. Instead Paul suggests they are interconnected… which prompts a thought about learning design needing to cater for this (“simplification, not decomposition”). Paul writes…
With respect to decision-making, the evolutionary perspective motivates us to build theories of decision-making that are fundamentally aimed at addressing the challenges of the kinds of decisions faced by our very distant ancestors, whose behaviour was primarily interactive and not deliberative. Here, we will take this approach and focus on what may be called ‘embodied decisions’ — decisions between actions during ongoing activity. For example, an animal escaping from a predator is continuously making decisions about the direction to run, ways of avoiding obstacles, and even foot placement on uneven terrain. Of course, humans also engage in such embodied decision-making during our daily lives, whether we are walking through a crowd or playing a sport. Importantly, embodied decisions have properties that are dramatically different from the economic choices that have dominated decision theories. First, the options themselves are potential action opportunities that are directly specified by the environment — what Gibson called ‘affordances’. The variables relevant to evaluating these options are overwhelmed by geometric and biomechanical contingencies and not merely related to offer values. Consequently, evaluation of the sensorimotor contingencies becomes the major challenge for the neural mechanism, whereas pure offer value estimation is computationally relatively trivial. Second, the options themselves are not categorical, like button presses in a psychology experiment. Instead, they are specified by spatio-temporal information, highly dependent on geometry, and even their identity is extended and blurry at the edges. Third, embodied decisions are perhaps the primary and archetypical kind of simultaneous decision. Animals encounter goods sequentially, but they are always surrounded by simultaneous action opportunities between which they must select. Finally, embodied decisions are highly dynamic. As an animal moves through its world, available actions themselves are constantly changing, some are vanishing while others appear, and all the relevant variables (outcome values, success probability, action cost) are always in flux. This precludes any mechanism relying on careful deliberation about static quantities or estimation of probabilities from similar examples, because each embodied decision is a single-trial situation with unique settings. Consequently, the mechanisms that serve embodied decisions must process sensory information rapidly and continuously, specifying and re-specifying available actions in parallel while at the same time evaluating the options and deciding whether to persist in a given activity or switch to a new one. Thus, the temporal distinction between thinking about the choice and then implementing the response, so central to economic theory and laboratory experiments on decisions, simply does not apply to decisions made during interactive behaviour.
(I have used footage from a football match in a previous post that reinforces this last point)
Even at the neural level, where in the past there has been a tendency to allocate decision making to certain regions of the brain and execution/action to others, Paul reveals things are far more interconnected than previously believed…
Decision making does not appear to be localized within particular higher cognitive centers. Instead, there is growing evidence that decisions, at least those reported through action, are made within the same sensorimotor circuits that are responsible for planning and executing the associated actions.
Perhaps the most practical value for sports and coaches will come from furthering our understanding of decision making at the scale of the “brain-body-environment” system as a whole, more so than looking at components of this system in isolation. Resultant insights will hopefully lead to more effective learning design/spaces that enhance players ability in time-constrained & dynamic situations.
References
Cisek P, Pastor-Bernier A. 2014 On the challenges and mechanisms of embodied decisions. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0479
Cisek P, Kalaska JF. 2010 Neural mechanisms for interacting with a world full of action choices. Annu.Rev. Neurosci. 33, 269–298.
