Mindless Coping in Competitive Sport: Some Implications and Consequences
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/17511320903365235
ISSN1751-1321
Autores Tópico(s)Action Observation and Synchronization
ResumoAbstract The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. Zusammenfassung Das Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, den phänomenologischen Ansatz zum Expertentum von Dreyfus und Dreyfus näher auszuarbeiten und zu erläutern, was ihr Konzept zu einem besseren Verständnis von Sportlern und ihren kognitiven Fähigkeiten bei Höchstleistungen beitragen kann. Dreyfus und Dreyfus abstrahierender Blick auf das erfahrungsabhängige Expertentum impliziert, dass Anfänger, insofern sie genügend Erfahrung haben, als Reaktion auf eine unmittelbare Situation möglicherweise eine Art intuitiver Expertise entwickeln können. Des Weiteren will dieser Artikel einige Implikationen und Konsequenzen eines solchen Ansatzes herausarbeiten und untersuchen, inwieweit Dreyfus und Dreyfus' Fähigkeitenmodell in der Lage ist, die verschiedenen Angriffe, die gegen ihre Sichtweise vortragen wurden, auszuhalten. Dies gilt insbesondere in Bezug auf die praktische Anwendung ihres Ansatzes auf den Fertigkeitenbereich des sportlichen Wettkampfs. Resumen El objectivo de este artículo es elaborar sobre el enfoque fenomenológico de la maestría tal y como proponen Dreyfus y Dreyfus, y dar una explicación sobre el grado que su enfoque puede contribuir a la hora de entender mejor cómo los atletas pueden usar sus capacidades cognitivas durante la ejecución de habilidades de alto nivel. La posición no figurativa [non-representacional] de Dreyfus y Dreyfus sobre la maestría basada en la experienca implica que los principiantes, dada suficiente experiencia, pueden desarrollar una maestría intuitiva como una respuesta situacional immediata. El artículo bosquejará subsecuentemente algunas implicaciones de tal enfoque y examinará cuánto el modelo de la habilidad de Dreyfus y Dreyfus es capaz de resistir los diferentes ataques que se han lanzado contra su posición, y en particular lo concerniente a la aplicación de su enfoque sobre el campo de las habilidades en el deporte competitivo. Résumé Le but de cet article est de réfléchir à l'approche phénoménologique de l'expertise, telle que proposée par Dreyfus et Dreyfus et de dresser un bilan de la manière dont leur approche pourrait contribuer à une meilleure compréhension des moyens mis en œuvre par les athlètes pour mobiliser leur capacités cognitives pendant l'exécution de gestes de haut niveau. La vision non représentative de l'expertise par l'empirique de Dreyfus et Dreyfus implique que les débutants avec assez d'expérience puissent développer une expertise intuitive comme réponse immédiate en situation. L'article mettra en conséquence en évidence certaines implications et conséquence d'une telle approche et examinera dans quelle mesure le modèle gestuel de Dreyfus et Dreyfus est capable de résister aux différentes attaques qui ont eu lieu contre eux, en particulier en prenant en considération l'application pratique de leur approche dans le domaine technique de la compétition sportive. Keywords: expertiseDreyfus and Dreyfusnon-representationalphenomenology Acknowledgements I am grateful to Stuart E. Dreyfus, Gunnar Breivik and Ejgil Jespersen for valuable discussions and comments on the topic of this paper. I also want to thank Mike McNamee for his generous and illuminating comments and help. The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Defence Institute has made this research possible by funding the project. Notes 1. The focus on inner mental aspects of human behaviour such as attention and memory was previously denied by the behaviourist tradition. 2. In the domain of sport psychology, regarded as a sub-category of experimental psychology, the information-processing approach has become highly influential since the middle of the 1960s (Summers Citation2004). This approach also reflects the psychological scientific zeitgeist of the time, although recent developments in ecological psychology, and in particular the dynamical system theories have proposed challenging anti-mentalist approaches to this hegemony (Abernethy and Sparrow 1992; Beek et al. Citation1995; Huys et al. Citation2004; Kihlstrom Citation1987). 3. The view that human cognition may comprise two different types of processing, controlled and automatic, was stated as early as 1890 by William James (James Citation1890). The further development of a dual processing theory of controlled and automatic processing, is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Schneider and Shiffrin (Schneider and Shiffrin Citation1977; Shiffrin and Schneider Citation1977). 4. According to Hill and Schneider, by the year of 2006 there were more than a hundred ongoing experiments tracking learning or expert performance by using fMRI and other non-invasive methods (Hill and Schneider 2006). 5. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's approach to skill acquisition is often referred to as 'the skill model' and this term will also be used in this text. 6. When there is reference to Dreyfus and Dreyfus and their approach to skill acquisition as one entity, I do this even with the knowledge that some of the texts cited are written by only one of them. Their tight collaboration for about 30 years, both making significant contributions to the skill model, is the reason for this unified reference style that I have chosen. 7. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill-model aims to describe how adults are learning new skills through instruction. This is with the purpose of making the phenomenology of skill development as clear as possible, even if they admit that many of our skills are acquired at an early age by the use of different learning strategies (Dreyfus Citation2004). Regarding the domain of competitive sport, there is no doubt that the skills needed to perform at highest possible level as an adult are acquired mainly at an early age. This implies that the adult expert competitor presumably has learned and developed his/her skills through other strategies than the way Dreyfus and Dreyfus describe the lowest learning stages in their model. This may not be considered as a problem as long as the adult's expert skill execution is independent of how the skill was initially learned. 8. Dreyfus and Dreyfus claim that it is easier to understand the situation intuitively than it is to react intuitively to it. This is inevitable since there are far fewer ways of seeing situations than there are ways of reacting. The proficient performer has not yet had enough real experience with the outcomes of the wide variety of possible responses to each of the situations to react intuitively (Dreyfus and Dreyfus Citation2007). 9. Automatic task representation, to use the term of Schneider and Shiffrin (Schneider and Shiffrin Citation1977; Sutton Citation2007), is characterised by decreased conscious control while the performance is fast, parallel, non-volitional and without any demands of attention. What makes automated behaviour so desirable from an information-processing perspective is that these processes consume little or no attentional resources, and will not produce a bottleneck in information processing. The cognitive capacity needed for attentional control can then be allocated to activities requiring more of this capacity (Hill and Schneider 2006; Kihlstrom Citation1987). Fortunately for athletes, posture and the majority of bodily movements operate in most cases without the need of awareness about the body and are therefore normally performed without any use of our conscious capacities (Gallagher Citation2005). 10. Donald Hebb (Citation1949) proposed a way that learning may take place at the level of synapses. If the connections between two cells are strengthened as a result of a successful prior experience, a functional bond is created, and the synaptic connection will normally be activated if a similar situation appears again. 11. On the basis of years of work on olfaction, vision, touch and hearing in alert and moving rabbits, Freeman has developed a model of rabbit learning based on the coupling of the rabbit's brain and the environment (Freeman Citation1991). For a more detailed examination of Freeman's model, projected onto the phenomena Merleau-Ponty has described, see Dreyfus (Citation2007). 12. Dreyfus and Dreyfus prefer the term absorbed coping to describe how the intuitive expert responds to everyday challenges in life and is how Dreyfus and Dreyfus express Heidegger's description of our everyday dealing with our environing world (Heidegger Citation1962). Breivik (Citation2007) has given an extended analysis of Dreyfus and Dreyfus's expression of absorbed coping and of their reliance on Heidegger. 13. A veritable flood of papers in the past ten years have supported, most using animal subjects and human brain imaging, the TDRL speculation. These papers identified the brain areas receiving dopamine neuron projections that seem to play roles in this process (Dreyfus Citation2004). 14. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's use of the term 'intuitive behavior' instead of the term 'automatic behavior' is an important distinction even if these kinds of behaviour may seem quite similar. Dreyfus and Dreyfus consider automatic processing of information as a hallmark of the information-processing tradition's approach. By using the term 'intuition' they create an explicit distance from this approach by proposing a description of the expert behaviour without the use of any rule. 15. An interesting notion in this regard is that Dreyfus and Dreyfus used the term 'pattern recognition' as their explanation of intuition in the 1986 version of Mind over machine (Dreyfus and Dreyfus Citation1986). By the 1988 paperback edition of the book (Dreyfus and Dreyfus Citation1988), they had replaced all references to 'pattern recognition' by 'discrimination and association' based on their new insight into artificial neural networks. This point is also mentioned in the 1988 preface. This turn has caused some confusion about Dreyfus and Dreyfus's understanding of intuition. Those who only know their approach through the 1986 version may get an incorrect understanding of their current view on intuition (Dreyfus Citation2004). 16. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's description of the expert as someone who doesn't necessarily represent mastery in their skill domain has been opposed by the tradition that focuses on expertise as a level of outstanding performance. The opportune critical question has been raised: why elaborate expertise if this kind of expertise may represent mediocre performances? It has even been claimed that the Dreyfus and Dreyfus approach describes only lower and intermediate levels of expertise (Shanteau Citation1992). 17. Personal correspondence with Stuart Dreyfus. 18. While chess and car driving are the most common examples used to describe human behaviour in the skill model, tennis is not the only sport used by Dreyfus and Dreyfus to exemplify expert behaviour. The baseball outfielder (Dreyfus Citation2007) and the basketball player Larry Bird (Dreyfus et al. Citation2003) are both used with the purpose of giving examples from real life. Neither of these sport examples has been used to discuss whether task characteristics affect behaviour in some specific direction. 19. The characteristics that separate these two groups are, according to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, related to the question whether it is possible to perform the skills expertly while thinking about something else. Driving is an example of a crude skill; it is possible to think about other things while driving a car. By contrast, the subtle skills like competitive sport require intense concentration (Dreyfus and Dreyfus Citation2005). 20. Sutton (Citation2007) elaborates how batsmen in cricket make use of embodied memory. Through his extensive knowledge of cricket, he gives a trustworthy and context-sensitive description of how batsmen respond to the specific situations they get exposed to during a game. 21. This lack of investigating whether different task characteristics influence the expert's behaviour probably finds its explanation in the fact that the skill model aims to describe human performance in philosophical terms in general and not in sport in particular. Sport is only used as examples of skilful human behaviour with the purpose of being examples only. 22. The different exceptions from the intuitive style of behaviour presented here should not be seen as a complete list of circumstances where it is appropriate for the expert to engage in deliberate actions. They should rather be understood as examples Dreyfus and Dreyfus give to show that there are situations that solicit the expert to respond with a wider repertoire of cognitive capacities than only depending on intuitive responses to particular situations. 23. According to this approach, the performer may even be in position to control his own cognition and may choose to change from intuitive to analytical cognition, even if the characteristics of the task are constant (Hamm Citation1988).
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