A scale-based approach to interdisciplinary research and expertise in sports

ABSTRACT

After more than 20 years 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Expertise
• interdisciplinary research
• dynamical systems
• ecological approach
• basketball free throw

Acknowledgements

This work has been carried out thanks to the support of the A*MIDEX project (no. ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the “Investissements d’avenir” French Government Programme, managed by the French National Research Agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Our notion of global and local constraints is not related with the use often made in the ecological literature to denote the degree of generality of an ecological constraint. This use of the term is typical in ecological learning studies, in which the task ecology is experimentally manipulated for each subject to control the processes of education of attention and calibration. Notable examples of this methodology can be found in Jacobs, Ibáñez-Gijón, Díaz, and Travieso (2011), Jacobs, Runeson, and Michaels (2001), and Jacobs, Silva, and Calvo (2009). In the definitions presented here, global constraints would correspond to constraints inherent to the task ecology, and the local constraints would be incidental to the task.

² The preliminary data presented in this article are part of a project that was approved by the local committee of the university. Informed consent was obtained from the participants prior to the experiments.

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the support of the A*MIDEX project [No. ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02] funded by the “Investissements d’avenir” French Government Programme, managed by the French National Research Agency.