The ecological dynamics of decision making in sport

Abstract

Objectives

The aim of this position paper is to consider the decision-making process as an integral part of goal-directed behaviour influenced by functional constraints at the scale of the environment–athlete relationship. To achieve this aim we discuss relevant theoretical ideas from ecological psychology, focusing particularly on ecological dynamics, as a contrast to more traditional perspectives on decision-making behaviour. To support the argumentation we briefly describe some recent empirical data from studies of sports that emphasise this alternative perspective on decision making. We conclude that traditional approaches analyse decisions as if they were not grounded, i.e., expressed behaviourally through actions in performance contexts. It is argued that an ecological approach should analyse affordances or action possibilities, when studying cognition in sport, demanding an integration of theories and ideas from the natural sciences in order to understand concepts like information and intentionality.

Conclusion

Decision-making behaviour is best considered at the level of the performer–environment relationship and viewed as emerging from the interactions of individuals with environmental constraints over time towards specific functional goals.

Introduction

In sport psychology, the majority of traditional decision-making studies reviewed by Starkes, Helsen, and Jack (2001) have adopted a closed systems analysis, typical of the classical scientific method founded on a determinate world view (Glimcher, 2005). In a determinate world, a major aim is the reduction of uncertainty through testing the causal relationship formed by related phenomena in ‘closed systems’. In the early decades of the last century, a challenge to a determinate view of the world was raised by quantum physics and taken up later in the social, psychological and neurosciences (Glimcher, 2005). Indeterminacy has begun to figure strongly in many ‘open-systems’ analyses of brain and behaviour (e.g., Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research Group, 1999; Hastie, 2001; Schall (2001), Schall (2004)). These developments in the natural sciences raise important questions for sport psychology's traditional ‘closed-systems’ modelling of rational decision making, founded on classical utility theory used to analyse economic systems (e.g., Bar-Eli, Lurie, & Breivik, 1999). As we consider in this paper, an alternative conceptualization of perception, cognition, decision making and action in ecological psychology demands an extension from the natural sciences (Turvey & Shaw (1995), Turvey & Shaw (1999)).

Clearly, the traditional rational approach is the result of many years of scholarly activity, and is, by any standard, a major intellectual achievement. Moreover, it has constantly generated new variations and improvements that have reinforced its dominant role in the psychological study of decision making (e.g., Hoffmann, Stoecker, & Kunde, 2004; Koch, Keller, & Prinz, 2004). Because it is the dominant paradigm on decision-making, challengers are required to offer a great deal before criticisms and alternative views are taken seriously. Nevertheless, alternative ways of understanding decision-making processes have arisen in recent years including the ecological approach (e.g., Araújo, Davids, Bennett, Button, & Chapman, 2004; Araújo, Davids, & Serpa, 2005) and the aim of this position paper is to elucidate the theoretical basis of this alternative view on decision making in sport. In our analysis we discuss how environmental and task constraints shape decision-making, providing sport psychologists with a theoretical framework for understanding how ecological information provides a basis for knowledge about the world. The ecological constraints of sport are distinguished by constraints of each individual performer and physical characteristics of participation locations for athletic activities, but also by social and cultural factors surrounding performance (Araújo, Davids, Bennett, Button, & Chapman (2004), Araújo, Davids, & Serpa (2005)). We introduce our position paper by highlighting the theoretical basis of an ecological approach to understanding cognition and decision making in sport, followed by a discussion of recent data generated from this alternative theoretical perspective. We conclude by suggesting some consequences for future research.

It has been well documented that an ecological approach stresses the lawful relations (i.e., relations based in the natural sciences) between any individual and the environment in which he or she functions (Turvey & Shaw, 1999; Turvey, Shaw, Reed, & Mace, 1981). Gibson (1979), in his theory of direct perception, emphasised such a functionalist approach by arguing that humans and other animals perceive and act on substances (e.g., water), surfaces (e.g., ground surrounding water), places (e.g., a swimming pool), objects (e.g., a ball) and events (e.g., a water polo competition) in the environment. Such properties provide opportunities for action, defined across the complementary relationship between the environment and person. These opportunities or possibilities for action, known as affordances (Gibson (1966), Gibson (1979)), are neither phenomenal nor subjective. They are defined by the complementary relations between objective, real and physical properties and are ecological, since they are properties of the environment relative to a performer (Turvey & Shaw, 1999). Affordances, therefore, are the starting point for the ecological study of what humans perceive, what they learn and know, and how they decide and act (Turvey, 1992). This view implies that, for an affordance, what a substance, etc., is and what a substance, etc. means are not separate. The constraining of behaviour by detected affordances includes, in one unitary activity, the processes of perceiving and conceiving (Turvey & Shaw, 1999).

Ecological psychology assumes a performer–environment mutuality and reciprocity, in which both combine to form a whole ecosystem. Under this synergy, biology and physics come together with psychology to define a science at a new scale—the ecological scale (Turvey & Shaw, 1995). In an emerging ecological physics a major challenge is to understand the ability of each individual to perceive the surrounding layout of the performance environment in the scale of its body and action capabilities (Turvey & Shaw (1995), Turvey & Shaw (1999)). From this perspective, the role of information and intentionality in decision making and action needs to be understood in physical terms (i.e., there is a need for a law-based understanding of discrete and dynamic aspects of human behaviour) (see Shaw, 2001; Shaw & Turvey, 1999).

The empirical studies described later in this paper, clarify that, as a performer moves with respect to his/her surroundings, opportunities for action persist, emerge and dissolve, even though the surroundings analysed as objects, and the relations among them, remain stable. Subtle changes of action can give rise to multiple and marked variations in opportunities for subsequent actions. We show that the dynamic process implied in the perception of affordances provides a basis by which a performer can control his/her behaviour prospectively (Turvey & Shaw, 1995). The studies show that, in investigating cognition, an individual and his/her performance environment constitute two structures that relate in a special way such that understanding of one is, simultaneously, an understanding of the other.

This theoretical interpretation of decision making and action in sport provides an extension of nonlinear dynamics and the developing physics of self-organizing systems to cognitive systems. From this ecological perspective, characteristic cognitive capabilities are what they are by virtue of laws and general principles. Within this approach, dynamics (involving laws of motion and change) and dynamical systems (involving time evolution of observable quantities according to law) can help us to understand decision-making in sport in line with the work initiated by Kugler, Kelso, & Turvey (1980), Kugler, Kelso, & Turvey (1982) (see also, Turvey & Carello, 1995). The dynamical approach that emerged from this work emphasised the physics of nonlinear dissipative systems as the basic explanatory tool for movement control and coordination in neurobiological systems. One of their major goals was “to explain the characteristic quantities (their emphasis) of a rhythmic behaviour—for example, its period, amplitude and energy per cycle [which] cannot be rationalized by neural considerations alone” (Kugler & Turvey, 1987, p. 4). For example, in the study of intralimb coordination (e.g., locomotion), Kugler and Turvey's (1987) model represented the joint effects of gravity's tendency to return the limbs to its equilibrium position and the spring's stiffness or restoring torque. This theoretical modelling fitted the data obtained by other researchers measuring different animals’ locomotion in different contexts, showing that there is a universality to the design of locomotion, a particular exploitation of nature's laws (Turvey, 1990). In a number of other scientific disciplines, including physics, biology and economics, ‘universality’ has been found to ubiquitous to the modelling of complex systems’ behaviour (Stanley et al., 2000).

This ecological dynamics approach provides a powerful theoretical framework for interpreting recent advances in the psychological, social and neurosciences, shaped by understanding of indeterminacy in brain and behaviour, and with clear implications for understanding decision-making behaviour in sport. The term ‘ecological dynamics’ signifies an approach using concepts and tools of dynamical systems to understand phenomena that occur at an ecological scale—the scale where the relationship between individuals and their environments is defined. Decision making from this perspective is considered a complex temporally extended process which does not characterize an individual as having made a decision prior to its behavioural expression (Beer, 2003). Indeed, if decisions are expressed by actions (Turvey & Shaw, 1995), the ecological analysis of human movement is the grounded way to understand decision-making. Rather, decision-making behaviour is considered at the level of the performer–environment relationship and is viewed as emerging from the interactions of individuals with environmental constraints over time towards specific goals. This functional analysis of decision making contrasts with traditional information processing approaches to decision-making in which humans have been modelled as ‘closed systems’, i.e. rational decision makers computing and selecting options from those represented in mental or neural models designed to maximize utility for performance (Mellers, Schwartz, & Cooke, 1998). The dominant tendency is to equate knowledge with concepts and to inquire about their form and about the inferential processes (explicit when cognition is defined as symbol manipulation and implicit when it is defined as connected subsymbols) that operate upon them. The grounding of the concepts (i.e., how they can refer to the environment of the performer) and the origins of the constraints on the inference mechanisms (i.e., the reasons that these mechanisms should function in just that way that renders their consequences sensible, meaning that one could, in principle, act upon them) are not of paramount concern.