Practical and methodological considerations

This penultimate chapter considers how athletes might develop the ability to exert attentional control. It outlines some approaches that might help athletes to switch their focus or re-distribute patterns of attention when they realize they have adopted task-irrelevant thoughts. It evaluates the use of mindfulness, quiet-eye training, pressurized training, among other approaches, as means of training attentional control. The chapter concludes by outlining a series of methodological approaches that might be employed by researchers wishing to test some of the predictions put forth by our model of skilled action and our proposal that skilled maintenance is underpinned by the flexible deployment of attentional resources.

Bodily awareness during skilled action

Prominent theories of skill acquisition posit that the performing body is absent during ‘habitualized’ or well-learned action. This chapter challenges this position by arguing that the body is never forgotten during skilled movement. Instead, it possesses what might be termed an enduring presence. Drawing on Colombetti’s (2011) taxonomy of the bodily self, the chapter shows how skilled performers may experience either a reflective or pre-reflective mode of bodily awareness depending on what they attend to during online skill execution. It proposes that while the body is always lived through as the subject of experience, performers will often have little choice but to take the body as the intentional object of their awareness. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is the dynamic interplay of various forms of bodily awareness that facilitates optimal performance and allows skilled performers to confront the challenges (e.g. injury, performance slumps) that are a ubiquitous feature of competitive environments.

Exploring the orthogonal relationship between controlled and automated processes

After identifying some of the weaknesses associated with linear, or serial, models of skill learning—with a focus on their failure to fully account for the ongoing relevance of motor control and attention to action—this chapter synthesizes the evidence presented over the course of this book to construct a model of skilled action that captures the complex relationship between automaticity and attentional focus. This model explains how these two processes operate in a synergistic fashion to help experts overcome the challenges they face in seeking to not only maintain but to continue to improve performance proficiency over long timescales, to update and improve motor execution in training contexts, and to stabilize performance under pressurized conditions. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing the role metacognition plays in allowing expert performers to identify and apply situationally appropriate modes of control.

Is optimal performance really ‘mindless’?

This chapter considers whether optimal/peak performance is as automatic or ‘mindless’ as many accounts of expertise suggest. It starts by exploring the phenomenon known as ‘flow’ which is typically presented as evidence that peak performance is mindless or automatic in nature. It then reviews recent literature in this area which reveals that the mind remains online during skilled action and especially during ‘clutch’ performances or when athletes are seeking to ‘make it happen’. It proceeds to discuss how ‘mindedness’ and bodily awareness are integral features of peak performance. It then uses this argument to uncover the potential perils associated with ‘non-mindedness’ or automated performance. In particular, the chapter discusses how excessive automaticity prevents athletes from exercising attentional control and results in a number of undesirable outcomes including slips, lapses, and in extreme cases, ‘choking’ under pressure.

Habit and skilled action

What is the role of habitual movement in expert action? This chapter begins by reviewing traditional conceptualizations of habit according to which our well-learned movements are mechanical-like tendencies to respond to stimuli in a preordained manner. It then draws on a range of theoretical perspectives which emphasize the generative nature of habits. It proceeds to discuss a variety of the ‘crises’ which confront the performing body (e.g. injury, ageing, normalization of bodily processes) and suggest that habits must be inherently flexible if experts are to successfully address these latter challenges. In doing so, it draws on the work of theorists such as Bourdieu, Carlisle, and Dewey. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the pedagogical strategies such as discursive practice that coaches and practitioners may use to extend habitual movement capacities and address habitual crises. It argues that experts acquire flexible habits which allows them to act back upon the body and to initiate change.

Continuous Improvement

How do great athletes defy the power law of practice, according to which improvements in skill eventually plateau? To solve this puzzle, this book presents a theory of ‘continuous improvement’ which emphasizes the role that conscious processes play in maintaining and advancing skilled performers’ movement capacities. It argues that continuous improvement requires the use of processes such as abstract thought and bodily awareness in order to strategically alter and improve habitual movements in response to contextual demands. The book also elucidates a number of strategies that might be used to improve an athlete’s attentional control and help them switch their focus when they realize they have adopted task-irrelevant thoughts. Finally, it presents a range of methodological approaches that might be used by researchers to better understand the attentional flexibility that characterizes skilled action across training and performance contexts.

Assessing the Effect of a Visual Navigational System on Route-Learning From an Ecological Perspective

Route-learning, considered from an ecological approach to perception, is posited to involve the detection of information over time that specifies a path from one location to another. The study examines whether the use of a visual navigational system (e.g., GPS) may impede route-learning by drawing attention away from transitions along a path that serve as information for way-finding. Virtual reality (VR) technology used in conjunction with an extensive, detailed environmental simulation was employed to explore this possibility. One group of participants drove a simulated car in VR along a designated path while relying on visual GPS guidance. It was expected that use of the GPS display would draw attention away from temporally continuous path information. A second group initially drove the same route without GPS guidance. Both groups drove the path a second time without navigational assistance. Overall, the percentage of correct actions taken at intersections (transitions) during the second trial were significantly lower for the first group who initially drove the route with visual GPS guidance as compared to those who initially traveled the route without it. The results are consistent with the kind of trade-off that is commonplace when tools are used to mediate and assist skilled action.

Neither mindful nor mindless, but minded: habits, ecological psychology, and skilled performance

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.

Toolmaking and the evolution of normative cognition

We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking, through social learning. If this is correct, the expansion of the normative domain beyond technique to encompass more abstract norms of fairness, reciprocity, ritual and kinship involved the elaboration of a basic platform for the guidance of skilled action by technical norms. This article motivates and defends this “skill hypothesis” for the origin of normative cognition and sets out various ways in which it could be empirically tested.