Abstract
On a Dreyfusian account performers choke when they reflect upon and interfere with established routines of purely embodied expertise. This basic explanation of choking remains popular even today and apparently enjoys empirical support. Its driving insight can be understood through the lens of diverse philosophical visions of the embodied basis of expertise. These range from accounts of embodied cognition that are ultra conservative with respect to representational theories of cognition to those that are more radically embodied. This paper provides an account of the acquisition of embodied expertise, and explanation of the choking effect, from the most radically enactive, embodied perspective, spelling out some of its practical implications and addressing some possible philosophical challenges. Specifically, we propose: (i) an explanation of how skills can be acquired on the basis of ecological dynamics; and (ii) a non-linear pedagogy that takes into account how contentful representations might scaffold skill acquisition from a radically enactive perspective.
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Notes
Our primary aim in this paper is put some meat on the bones of a radically enactive, embodied account of the roots of expertise and how it is acquired. Although we begin by discussing Dreyfus-style accounts of choking we fully accept that more philosophical work is needed in order to clarify whether 'choking’ picks out a well-defined phenomenon. We agree with other contributors to this special issue that the standard Dreyfusian formulation, for all its popularity, leaves the notion of choking under-conceptualised. More work is needed in order to assess claims about the empirical support that popular explanations associated the standard formulation are said to enjoy (see Christensen, Sutton and McIlwain (this volume), Papineau (this volume)).
Although evidently wedded to representationalism in key respects, Beilock’s account moves beyond the traditional classical cognitivist story. For example, she allows that the contents involved in such cognition need not take the form of amodal propositions. Distancing herself from classical cognitivism in this one respect, Beilock gestures to work by Barsalou (1999): she allows that the kind of representations of interest to understanding skilled expertise can be conceived of as “multimodal traces of neural activity that contain at least some of the affordances and motor information present during actual sensorimotor experience” (Beilock 2008, p. 20).
There are other related cases in which commitment – even if only tacit – to traditional assumptions about the mind and how it relates to action impose a strong, an apparently negative, constraints on thinking about training methods. For example, there is experimental evidence in sports science, going back to the mid-90s showing that video-based training may yield limited improvements in video-based tasks. Williams, Ward, and Chapman (2003) used video simulation training in field-hockey goalkeepers in penalty-flick situation and concluded that the group who received the perceptual training improved their response times significantly (when compared to control and placebo groups). They also concluded that such training effect on anticipation skills had transference from the laboratory to the field, highlighting the practical application of the program. Apart form this one study, it has not been shown that such improvements actually transfer to on-field performances. Nevertheless, there has been a widespread adoption of this training practice over the past two decades. Why? This cannot have been driven solely by the, rather weak, empirical findings. Rather, it would appear, that adoption of this approach to training makes sense to those who accept a framework for thinking about cognition according to which perception and action are strongly separate, and according to which decision making is really a matter of forming in-the-head representations (see Dicks et al. 2014 for a full discussion). This case serves as a salient reminder that even though embodied cognition is not news to those working in sports science, it matters for practice which theoretical framework one adopts in understanding how cognition is embodied. What this case underlines is the importance of making explicit the relevant connections between framework, theory and practice.
This line of general reply also works when it comes to making sense of Sutton’s (2007) analysis of expert batting in cricket, cited by Cappuccio and Wheeler (2012, pp. 23–24). Sutton writes “good players will be constantly resetting their response repertoire in ways which may have been discussed or partly planned out in advance, either deliberately or simply as the result of the sedimented history of relevant experience … One successful case was when, during the one-day internationals before the 2005 Ashes series, Andrew Strauss set himself more than once to get way across to the offside, outside the line of good-length balls from Jason Gillespie and use the pace to lift them over fine leg, a shot unthinkable in less audacious circumstances” (Sutton 2007, p. 775). It would seem that in cases (such as the one described) the representations that are being deployed by skilled athletes are decidedly not of the inaccessible subpersonal sort. Nor are they lacking in objective content. Rather they appear to be linguistically contentful representations of the kind that can be readily expressed and shared with others.
So far, we have been talking about technique. Nonetheless, if we would like to pay attention to tactical behavior in a game, there are scaffolded practices that could help as well. During the game, players face technical/tactical situations to solve continuously. Nonetheless, the situations they face are constrained by strategy that is referred to: (i) system (e.g. 4-3-3 in football); (ii) style of playing (attacker, counter-attacker, defensive); and (iii) game plan (e.g. ‘firstly you should make him tired and then push his weak points’). Such strategic elements are instantiated, maintained and/or varied in real time by the interaction with the coach (giving instructions during the game) and/or in interaction with other teammates.
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Hutto, D.D., Sánchez-García, R. Choking RECtified: embodied expertise beyond Dreyfus. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 309–331 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9380-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9380-0