Jorge Ibáñez-Gijón

This study provides a systematic synthesis of empirical research on mental workload (MWL) in air traffic control (ATC). MWL is a key concept in research on innovative technologies, because the assessment of MWL is crucial to the evaluation of such technologies. Our specific focus was on physiological measures of MWL. The used search strategy identified 39 peer-reviewed publications that analysed ATC tasks, examined different levels of difficulty of the ATC task, and considered at least one physiological measure of MWL. Positive relations between measures of MWL and task difficulty were observed most frequently, indicating that the measures indeed allowed the assessment of MWL. The most commonly used physiological measures were brain measures (EEG and fNIR) and heart rate measures. The review revealed a need for more precise descriptions of crucial experimental parameters in order to permit a transition of the field towards more interactive and dynamic types of analysis. Practitioner summary: Research on innovative technology in air traffic control (ATC) depends on assessments of mental workload (MWL). We reviewed empirical research on MWL in ATC. Brain and heart measures often allow assessments of MWL. Better descriptions of experiments are needed to allow comparisons among studies and more dynamic and interactive analyses.

In sports, strategy and tactics play a decisive role. This is certainly so in sport games like volleyball in which the players need to promptly adapt their actions to the continuously changing game situations. In this paper, we will take a closer look at how strategic and tactical decisions come about. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to tackle this discussion from the angle of the ecological-dynamical approach, in which concepts as perception-action coupling, affordances, and self-organization are put forward as vital elements to explain the control of actions/sport skills. In referring to animal behavior, we will push the idea that cognitive interventions are not a prerequisite for strategic and tactical interventions. Second, we want to translate these theoretical concepts into some general guidelines for coaches and practitioners. In doing so, we hope to increase the understanding that for practice the environmental constraints should be embraced in order to improve the strategic and tactical capacities of the players.

In 2017, Di Paolo, Buhrmann, and Barandiarán proposed a list of criteria that post-cognitivist theories of learning should fulfill. In this article, we review the ecological theory of direct learning. We argue that this theory fulfills most of the criteria put forward by Di Paolo et al. and that its tools and concepts can be useful to other post-cognitivist theories of learning. Direct learning holds that improvements with practice are driven by information for learning that can be found in the dynamic organism-environment interaction. The theory formally describes information for learning as a vector field that spans a space with all the perception-action couplings that may be used to perform an action. Being located at a point of such a space means using a specific perception-action coupling. Changes in perception-action couplings due to learning can be represented as paths across the space, and can be explained with the vector field of information for learning. Previous research on direct learning considered actions that were best understood with single perception-action couplings. To conclude the article, and inspired by the criteria of Di Paolo et al., we discuss an extension of the theory to actions that are best understood with multiple perception-action couplings.

The theory of affordances states that perception is of environmental properties that are relevant to action-capabilities of perceivers. The present study illustrates how concepts and methodological tools from the theory of affordances may help to advance research in the field of sensory substitution. The sensory substitution device (SSD) that was used consisted of two horizontal rows of 12 coin motors that each vibrated as a function of the distance to the nearest object. Sixty blindfolded participants used the SSD to explore virtual horizontal apertures with different widths. They were asked to judge the passability of the apertures. Participants with narrow shoulders judged narrower apertures as passable than participants with wide shoulders. This difference disappeared when aperture width was scaled to shoulder width, demonstrating that perception was body scaled. The actual aperture width was closely related to aspects of the exploratory movements and to aspects of the vibrotactile stimulation that was obtained with the exploratory movements. This implies that the exploratory movements themselves and the vibrotactile stimulation were both informative about the aperture width, and hence that the perception of passability may have been based on either of them or on a global variable that spans vibrotactile as well as kinaesthetic stimulation. Similar performance was observed for participants who accomplished the 7-trial familiarization phase with or without vision, meaning that practice with vision is not indispensable to learn to use the SSD.

After more than 20years since the introduction of ecological and dynamical approaches in sports research, their promising opportunity for interdisciplinary research has not been fulfilled yet. The complexity of the research process and the theoretical and empirical difficulties associated with an integrated ecological-dynamical approach have been the major factors hindering the generalisation of interdisciplinary projects in sports sciences. To facilitate this generalisation, we integrate the major concepts from the ecological and dynamical approaches to study behaviour as a multi-scale process. Our integration gravitates around the distinction between functional (ecological) and execution (organic) scales, and their reciprocal intra- and inter-scale constraints. We propose an (epistemological) scale-based definition of constraints that accounts for the concept of synergies as emergent coordinative structures. To illustrate how we can operationalise the notion of multi-scale synergies we use an interdisciplinary model of locomotor pointing. To conclude, we show the value of this approach for interdisciplinary research in sport sciences, as we discuss two examples of task-specific dimensionality reduction techniques in the context of an ongoing project that aims to unveil the determinants of expertise in basketball free throw shooting. These techniques provide relevant empirical evidence to help bootstrap the challenging modelling efforts required in sport sciences.

The anticipation of the direction of football penalty kicks was assessed using Point Light Displays (PLDs). To that end, Principal Component Analyses (PCAs) were applied on previously registered penalty kicks. The PCAs provided an accurate description of the kicks: an average of 98.7% of the variance was explained with the first 6 PCA modes. The results of the PCAs were used to create 7 stimulus conditions, showing PLDs of the kicks as seen from the perspective of the goalkeeper. The first condition included all PCA modes and hence used PLDs of the original penalties. The remaining 6 conditions used all PCA modes until Mode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, respectively. Participants observed the PLDs until the moment of ball contact and judged the lateral direction of the kicks. The percentages of correct judgments per condition revealed that the information for the anticipation of penalty kicks is contained in relatively few PCA modes. This confirms previous results obtained with tennis ground strokes (Huys, Smeeton, Hodges, Beek, & Williams, 2008 Huys, R. , Smeeton, N. J. , Hodges, N. J. , Beek, P. J. , & Williams, A. M. (2008). On the dynamic information underlying visual anticipation skill. Perception & Psychophysics, 70, 1217–1234. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ), although for tennis ground strokes even fewer PCA modes seemed to be required to achieve accurate anticipation. The relevance of the ecological notion of information for the PCA-motivated body of research is discussed.

The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between stress and sport performance in a controlled setting. The experimental protocol used to induce stress in a basketball free throw was the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and its control condition (Placebo-TSST). Participants (n = 19), novice basketball players but trained sportspersons, were exposed to two counterbalanced conditions in a crossover design. They were equipped with sensors to measure movement execution, while salivary cortisol and psychological state were also measured. The task consisted of two sequences of 40 free throws, one before either the TSST or Placebo-TSST and one after. Physiological and psychological measures evidenced that the TSST induced significant stress responses, whereas the Placebo-TSST did not. Shooting performance remained stable after the TSST but decreased after the Placebo-TSST. We found no effect of the TSST or Placebo-TSST on movement execution. A multivariate model of free throw performance demonstrated that timing, smoothness and explosiveness of the movements are more relevant to account for beginner’s behavior than stress-related physiological and psychological states. We conclude that the TSST is a suitable protocol to induce stress responses in sport context, even though the effects on beginners’ free throw performance and execution are small and complex.

While the call for interdisciplinary studies has been loud and clear over the last decade or so, the number of interdisciplinary publications in sport sciences is rather limited. One of the reasons for this scarcity is the complexity of the research process itself. Still, the combination and integration of information from different scientific disciplines seems to be important to better explain how elite performance comes about. In this article, we focus on this issue and discuss the advantages of interdisciplinary research for understanding how elite athletes are able to achieve such high-proficiency levels. The first section provides an overview of the studies that investigated elite performance in sports. In the second section, we focus on the issue of interdisciplinarity and illustrate how the ecological–dynamical approach and the concept of dimensional reduction can be used to explain how elite performers cope with the complex nature of sport skills. In the last section, we present a research outline and some practical considerations that can be helpful for researchers who aim to study sport skills from an interdisciplinary perspective.