Cognition and action : an ecological perspective in sport

• Autor(a) principal: Dias, Gonçalo
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Cabral Mendes, Pedro, Santos, João, Gama, José, Mendes, Rui, Menayo, Ruperto, Pedro Fuentes García, Juan
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/46669
• topic: cognition; action; ecological dynamics; environment; athlete

The ecological approach that has come to be used in recent years to frame the learning and performance of sports skills, contrasts with the explanatory models of motor control that traditionally attach great importance to the mental representations of movement. In this sense, this work frames the ecological vision of cognition in sport in a comprehensive perspective, describing the athlete as a whole and not just what is happening inside his "head". We conclude that the emergent action in sports context results primarily from the interaction that the athlete establishes with the environment, therefore it is not necessary to use cognitive processes designed to succeed in the task. In this context, we propose to coaches that they should explore the functional aspects that underlie the manipulation of individual, environmental and task constraints, thus allowing their athletes to autonomously discover motor solutions and find relevant information-action couplings by themselves.