ABSTRACT
Whereas behavioural scientists have tended to emphasize the personal constraints of performers in attempting to understand perception and action in sport, from an ecological dynamics perspective, skilled behaviour consists of intentional adaptation to the constraints imposed by the environment during task performance. Ecological dynamics integrates an information-based approach to perception with a dynamical systems orientation to action. For a given task, a performer and the performance environment are treated as a pair of dynamical sub-systems that are coupled and interact mechanically and informationally. Their continuous interactions give rise to behavioural dynamics, a vector field with stable, avoided and changing system states. Sudden transitions in behaviours indicate that decisions emerge in the ‘intending-perceiving-acting cycle’. These ideas imply that there should be a strong emphasis on the specificity of the relations between the individual and the environment in designing representative settings both for experiments and for practice in sport.
