Vol. 14 No. 5 (2020)

Special Issue on Cognitive and Ecological Approaches to Sports Skills

Description

In everyday life as well as in sports settings, individuals coordinate their movements to achieve simple goals like walking and talking up to complex tasks such as manipulating objects in an unstable environment. This ability to coordinate actions with teammates and/or opponents is often critical to success in sports. The traditional approach to understanding the acquisition, development, and assessment of sports skills involves the idea of cognitive science, which consider that performance is predicated on the existence of a representation or schema, responsible for the organization and regulation of behaviors (i.e., the role of the brain based on information-processing theory). In the last years, the rapid development of technologies led to improvements in our knowledge of brain activity during skills acquisition, development, and assessment, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and mobile EEG. Instead, ecological psychology theories are not too much interested in cognition and focus on the available information constraints that afford possibilities for individuals’ perception, what they learn and know, and how they decide and act. From this perspective, the emergence of coordinated behaviors in skills acquisition, development, and assessment is based on the formation of interpersonal synergies between individuals resulting from collective actions predicated on shared action possibilities (affordances). The two theories differ in their fundamental approaches, they are opposed to the actions explanations, but sometimes may be complementary to each other. On this special topical collection of the “Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior”, we offer a space for authors to submit their recent work as original research articles, research notes, or systematic reviews addressing contributions to one or both of the two theories of motor behavior applied to individual and collective sports performance. Examples can include but are not restricted to investigations into: 1) skills acquisition, development, and assessment, 2) forms of interactions amongst teammates and/or opponent players in-game situations, and 3) methodological aspects, challenges, and solutions to the assessment of sports skills.

Guest editors

Dr Rodrigo Aquino - Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória, ES, Brazil (ORCID - 0000-0002-4885-7316)

Ms Luiz H Palucci Vieira - São Paulo State University (Unesp), Bauru - SP, Brazil (ORCID - 0000-0001-6981-756X)

Dr Filipe Manuel Clemente - Escola Superior Desporto e Lazer, Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana de Castelo, Portugal (ORCID - 0000-0001-9813-2842)

Dr João Cláudio Braga Pereira Machado - Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), Manaus - AM, Brazil ORCID - 0000-0001-9827-5296)  

Dr Gibson Moreira Praça - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte - MG, Brazil (ORCID - 0000-0001-9971-7308)

Peer-review process

The editorial review process followed the BJMB's peer-review guidelines. The manuscripts were handled by the guest editor that invited at least two independent reviewers for a double-blind review.