Central Annals of Sports Medicine and Research

Short Communication *Corresponding author

Ana Maria Abreu, Universidade Europeia, Laureate

Expertise in Sports: Reconciling International Universities, Estrada da Correia, nº53,

1500-210Lisbon, Portugal, Tel: 351-210-309-900; Fax: 351-
210-309-917; Email:

Sports Sciences with Findings Submitted: 20 November 2014

Accepted: 22 March 2015

from Experimental and Social Published: 25 March 2015

Copyright

Psychology and Neuroscience

© 2015 Abreu et al.

OPEN ACCESS

Ana Maria Abreu1* and Ricardo Duarte2 Keywords

1
Universidade Europeia, Laureate International Universities, Portugal • Levels of analysis
2
School of Human Kinetics, University of Lisbon, Portugal • Sports Science
• Integration of different domains

Abstract
Sports Science is a fairly new and much needed scientific discipline that has
been gaining terrain in the scientific community. However, and similarly to other novel
disciplines, in order to gain a place as a consolidated scientific discipline, there is
a certain need of assertion. Such assertion of a new field of research mainly relies
on the development of novel and insightful theories. Nevertheless, the new need not
oppose the old, and findings from other, more established fields of research, need not
be negated as a form of affirmation of the newer discipline. Take Expertise in Sports.
Typically, Sports Science approaches this theme without integrating findings from other
areas such as Experimental and Social Psychology and Neuroscience. We suggest
that these are but different levels of analysis that can be reconciled and that such
reconciliation should render Sports Science a more comprehensive and richer domain.

INTRODUCTION with the more typical ecological approaches of interpreting

As with other fairly new scientific disciplines, the youth of
Sports Science entails some difficulties concerning the integration
of findings from other more (or less) established areas of
knowledge. Sports scientists do not actively negate findings from
other areas such as Experimental Psychology, Social Psychology,
and Neuroscience. However, few attempts for integrating results
from other areas of expertise have been made for an exception
see [1].Now, we are not saying that Social Psychology is not
used to explain the social and psychological aspects of Sports
and Exercise, such as ‘team cohesion’, ‘communication between
peers’, ‘coaching behaviors’ and ‘leadership’, etc.[2]. What we
are stating is that performance itself, is grossly examined from
a motor action stand point embed in a context defined by its
constraints. Here, we suggest that, in order to better describe
and understand the processes underlying expert performance
(e.g., a successful kick to a goal), one would benefit from a
holistic view integrating different levels of complexity - from
genes, to brain activity to social interaction. It is, of course, easier
to investigate each level of analysis separately due to research
design limitations. However, we are probably oversimplifying,
when ‘if – then’ affirmations obtained in one research field (e.g.
Neuroscience) are opposed by ‘or else’ statements stemming
from a different level of analysis (e.g. Sports Sciences). It seems
paramount to marry social, affective and neuroscientific stances
performance in Sports Sciences.
Consider our solar system. We can try to fully understand each
celestial body. We are, however, at a loss for true understanding,
if the interactions between them are not contemplated. The solar
system is much more exciting, if one considers the gravitational
pull of the sun on the planets and the consequences of floating
debris on the stability of the system. We cannot pretend to fully
comprehend the function and structure of a planet if we dismiss
the complex planetary systems wherein that planet is embedded.
Physical systems interact, just like team players during sports
competitions. Such interactions have been suggested to be based
on informational flow fields that allow teams to produce complex,
functionally integrated patterns - resembling more evolved
communities of organisms – the super organisms [3].
MOTOR PERFORMANCE AND SOCIAL
INTERACTION
The interactional properties, described above, observe the
same rules that underpin social behavioural systems: Action
leads to reaction by means of reflexive monitoring of evolving
understandings [4]. Social science has long attempted to explain
interaction-based encounters. Say you go to a counter to buy a
train ticket. The ticket seller reacts badly to the fact that you are
paying 45 euros in coins. The clerk refuses to sell you the ticket.

Cite this article: Abreu AM, Duarte R (2015) Expertise in Sports: Reconciling Sports Sciences with Findings from Experimental and Social Psychology and
Neuroscience. Ann Sports Med Res 2(3): 1020.

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You have then, before you, many options. The choice of re-action
(from an array of multiple possibilities) will be guided/informed
by a series of weights given to time (e.g., are you in a hurry?),
space (e.g., do you really need to move from here to there?), to
instrumental play (e.g., can you make use of another means of
transportation?) and, of course, by tolerance (e.g., how quick are
you to react to the teller’s bad mood?) and other internal and
external constraints. You can choose to react in many different
ways. But your choice of reaction will lead to a counter-action
that you should bear in mind. This social game is replayed
many times a day. However, we forget this action-reaction
rule is applied in many other encounters, such as in sporting
contexts. If action causes a reaction, thus, in order to modulate
the contextual reaction to our actions – one needs to practice. In
a recent study [5], tactical athletes (police officers) participate
in simulated encounters with suspects. The authors show that
suspects were faster in getting a shot off in most encounters,
having the advantage in life or death situations. The authors go
on to defend that kinaesthetic awareness and stimuli-response
training should be addressed in order to give the tactical athletes
the edge. It has later been suggested [6] that this can be achieved
by training neurological pathways.If practice involves training
the brain, than there should be more to expert performance
than just a fine-tuning of decision making as an affordance based
approach [7].
MOTOR PERFORMANCE AND THE BRAIN
A deep understanding of brain functions and mechanisms may
allow sports scientists to better model and design their practice
and research experiments. However, we cannot solely consider
brain function, nor can we simply ponder statistical analyses of
invariances of the physical context to explain performance.These
invariances should be viewed as informational units that are
processed by the brain. Although insightful, Gibson’s ecological
approach [8] to perception and action needs not necessarily
discard cognition. Indeed, Gibson [9] distinguished cognition in
terms of ‘knowledge about the environment’ and ‘knowledge of
the environment’, which was later linked to Milner & Good ale’s
two-visual systems model [10] to explain instances in which
individuals use‘ perception for recognition’ and ‘perception for
action’[11]. Identifying cognition with perception might mislead
one to think that perception can lead to action without subtending
neural substrates. Actually, perception leads to an information
pickup that is filtered by the brain. Subsequent neural processes
manage the flood of information by selecting important salient
cues to be processed [12]. This neural processing, in turn, informs
and triggers action. It is possible that a certain confusion between
rhythmic reflexive action and voluntary movements might kindle
the idea that action does not need neurally processed cognition.
Although reflexive movements do not entail intention or action
plans, both reflexive and voluntary movements share some
of the same circuits of the spinal chord that also participate in
cortex governed voluntary motor action [13]. However, even in
the case of rhythmic or reflexive actions that need not superior
cortex control, the brain always participates, if not in filtering the
informational flow.
FINDINGS FROM EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Let us now consider a seminal study that investigated human
Ann Sports Med Res 2(3): 1020 (2015)
Abreu et al. (2015)
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postural control in the elderly and in young adults [14]. These
authors have shown the elderly present less variation in their
centre of pressure (COP) while standing. These findings might
seem counterintuitive, as they suggest a higher stability for
aging people compared to young adults. However, and if we take
into account the Darwinian considerations on evolution and
survival of the fittest, we can surely understand that the more
one is able to adapt to error/constraints, the greater the extent of
possibilities one can choose from to react to a changing system,
and thus, the better equipped one is to survive in a shifting
environment. Hence, it becomes obvious why it is more beneficial
for young adults to sway, adapting to posture constraints
and fatigue, changing COP from one foot to the other. These
interpretations share a similar understanding to the ecological
approach formulated by Edward Reed [15]. This author argues
that individuals are selected by the environment since the
identification of opportunities for action depends on their action
capabilities. One who circumstantially does not possess these
capabilities, not acting upon certain opportunities for action,
will probably not be in advantage over others, and consequently,
will not be ‘selected’ by the environment. Taken together, the
previous considerations suggest that in social as well as in non-
social encounters, individuals ‘must adapt to constraints, in
order to be amongst the fittest and survive’. For the case we are
trying to make, we might state that in sports ‘athletes must adapt
to constraints, in order to be amongst the fittest and score (or
simply perform at the highest expert level)’.
In this context we can understand how periodic and random
behaviours are not optimal for adaptation to a changing
environment [16]. A periodic behaviour has no room for adaptation
and follows the same routine independently of constraints; and
a random behaviour follows a variable routine but this routine
is independent of contextual constraints. Behaviour as a chaotic
system, on the other hand, perfectly explains how individuals
adapt to contextual variations. Behaviour as a chaotic system
seems to follow a certain pattern, but allows for variability from
the pattern base, to adapt to environmental changes. So how
does a team adapt to contextual information? The concept of
synchrony [17,18] can give us some insights on this. Consider a
series of metronomes that synchronize when placed on the same
media (a thin board supported by two horizontally positioned
soda cans). The media changes with metronome action (action-
reaction revisited). The fact that the soda cans are not moving in
a fixed (i.e. periodic) system or moving independently from the
metronomes and from each other (i.e. random system) allows for
system adaptation. The cans sway due to the metronomes and
the metronomes adapt back to this sway. This action-reaction
system is continuously put in motion – changes in the sway of
the cans lead to changes in the metronome movement and vice-
versa. This should lead to a base pattern that is able to adapt to
the changing flow, i.e. a chaotic system. This synchronization
phenomenon also arises at a team level, in which team players
synchronize their on-field movements to adapt to the changing
performance constraints [19]. In this case, the system components
(i.e., the players) are not physically connected but share similar
intentions and the same informational media. This is why a
prolonged stoppage in play (e.g., substitution, injured player)
tends to break team synchrony. However, synchrony might not
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always be of benefit and a controlled offbeat rhythm might also,
at times, be beneficial, in the interplay between team players and
their opponents. Consider, for instance, an attacker in possession
of the ball trying to break symmetry with the defender in order
to score a goal [20]. Now, all of this falls into place if we consider
this media (the board placed on the soda cans) to be the shared
perceptual media. We can now make all these independent
findings fit this multiple approach of movement.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Evidence from many behavioural studies [21] shows those
experts and novices attend to different key aspects of the sports
context in motion. Experts tend to attend more to kinematical
body features, while novices attend to random points in the
scenery. Moreover, motor expertise has been linked to mirror
neuron activation (a property of the Action-Observation Network)
during the viewing of motor actions [22,23]. Furthermore, the
anticipation of actions is distinct in novices and experts and
is guided by attention to certain body cues subtended by the
activation of the extra striate body area in experts only [24].
Let us now consider the crucial study by Chua and
collaborators [25] where these authors decided to investigate
the reasons for cultural differences in perceptual judgments (e.g.
why do westerners attend more to focal objects while East Asians
attend more to contextual information?). It is commonplace to
assume that differences in what we see arise from the filtering of
our subjective mind, given the same visual experience. In a sense,
we have assumed that being able to see, we can access the same
information that we might then interpret differently. This research
by Chua and colleagues has shed new light on our old beliefs by
showing that Chinese and American students looked at scenes
in photographs in distinct ways. The great novelty of this study
was in showing that previously observed cultural differences in
judgment and memory between East Asians and North Americans
actually derived from differences in what both these groups
actually saw. The rational of this study stemmed from a growing
body of evidence that suggested that North Americans tended to
be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal
object whereas East Asians were generally more holistic, giving
more consideration to the context. The origin of these differences
was nevertheless unknown. These authors aimed to ascertain if
these differences in scenario evaluation resulted from encoding,
retrieval, or mental comparison stages of perceptual-cognitive
processing, or whether they might result from reporting bias.
The ground-breaking evidence brought to light by this study
consisted in the discovery that Cultural differences in judgment
and memory between different people derive from differences
in what they actually see. Thus, one might say that the way we
interpret and adapt to the world (or to a sports setting) results
from the way we “see” it. If cultural differences lead to different
attention loads given to different parts of the scenery, we can
only imagine what happens given different levels of expertise.
The implications of these findings are of paramount importance
for training programs and beg the question: “How can players be
in synchrony and recognize the same cues for a better adaptation
to the system?”
Taking the above into consideration we now arrive to
the following: ‘in action-reaction systems, one must adapt to
Ann Sports Med Res 2(3): 1020 (2015)
Abreu et al. (2015)
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constraints. Adaptation depends on the correct recognition of
the constraints as such, leading to synchronous activity between
players’. Hence, the teams that are better able to detect the
important cues from opponents and their team-mates (integrated
in context, i.e. considering the constellation of speeds, directions,
etc. between ball and players, for example) will be better
equipped to win the game. Elite performances thus result from a
series of in-context complex phenomena: from neural activation,
to emotional (internal) and physical (external) contextual
processing, to effector command, to action. Crucially, practicing a
sport is engaging in an action-reaction system where contextual
constraints might limit and direct performance as key information
sources unfold [26]. Performance should thus be mediated by
the anticipation of these contextual changes. It is possible that
expertise might afford a better adaptation to the variables that
inform action, be it because the consolidated expert programs
allow for the resolution of contextual problems, or because they
allow for the recognition of the crucial variables as such. Thus,
achieving excellence in sports might be related, in part, to the fine-
tuning of specific anticipatory ‘resonant’ mechanisms that allow
for an earlier and more accurate prediction of the consequences
of the actions of others [27].
Together, these and other seminal studies have paved
the ground for an integrative view on human movement that
allows us to comprehend elite performance. This integrative
view of complex human action performance reconciles different
scientific disciplines that have thus far produced independent
explanations for a common phenomenon at different levels of
analysis. Such an integrative approach allows for the description
of synchronous and rhythmic actions, guided by cue perception
and subtending brain activation linked to the processing of
contextual information in chaotic, action-reaction systems.
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Cite this article

Abreu AM, Duarte R (2015) Expertise in Sports: Reconciling Sports Sciences with Findings from Experimental and Social Psychology and Neuroscience. Ann
Sports Med Res 2(3): 1020.

Ann Sports Med Res 2(3): 1020 (2015)

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