Abstract
The recent upsurge in “brain training and perceptual-cognitive training,” proposing to improve isolated processes, such as brain function, visual perception, and decision-making, has created significant interest in elite sports practitioners, seeking to create an “edge” for athletes. The claims of these related “performance-enhancing industries” can be considered together as part of a process training approach proposing enhanced cognitive and perceptual skills and brain capacity to support performance in everyday life activities, including sport. For example, the “process training industry” promotes the idea that playing games not only makes you a better player but also makes you smarter, more alert, and a faster learner. In this position paper, we critically evaluate the effectiveness of both types of process training programmes in generalizing transfer to sport performance. These issues are addressed in three stages. First, we evaluate empirical evidence in support of perceptual-cognitive process training and its application to enhancing sport performance. Second, we critically review putative modularized mechanisms underpinning this kind of training, addressing limitations and subsequent problems. Specifically, we consider merits of this highly specific form of training, which focuses on training of isolated processes such as cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking) and visual perception processes, separately from performance behaviors and actions. We conclude that these approaches may, at best, provide some “general transfer” of underlying processes to specific sport environments, but lack “specificity of transfer” to contextualize actual performance behaviors. A major weakness of process training methods is their focus on enhancing the performance in body “modules” (e.g., eye, brain, memory, anticipatory sub-systems). What is lacking is evidence on how these isolated components are modified and subsequently interact with other process “modules,” which are considered to underlie sport performance. Finally, we propose how an ecological dynamics approach, aligned with an embodied framework of cognition undermines the rationale that modularized processes can enhance performance in competitive sport. An ecological dynamics perspective proposes that the body is a complex adaptive system, interacting with performance environments in a functionally integrated manner, emphasizing that the inter-relation between motor processes, cognitive and perceptual functions, and the constraints of a sport task is best understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis.
Highlights
There has been a recent upsurge in the “process training industry,” proposing how to improve isolated processes such as perceptual and cognitive capacities, like vision, attention, creative thinking, memory, “ultra-fast” decision-making, in order to improve performance at work, in tests and examinations, and sport
Despite empirical evidence suggesting that the development of a more generic knowledge base is limited, the additive, modular, step-like approach to learning key cognitive capacities supporting performance is strongly embedded in applied sport psychology
How effective and efficient is the use of valuable resources on process training activities in elite sport? Do these process training programmes work and, if so, how can we make them even better?
Summary
There has been a recent upsurge in the “process training industry,” proposing how to improve isolated processes such as perceptual and cognitive capacities, like vision, attention, creative thinking, memory, “ultra-fast” decision-making, in order to improve performance at work, in tests and examinations, and sport. We provide an ecological dynamics rationale to explain the limitations of the preferred modularized approach to training processes of perception and cognition and brain functions for understanding effects on sport performance To address these issues, we first evaluate current approaches and evidence that support perceptual-cognitive training and its application in sport. Substantial evidence for this claim is lacking, along with a rigorous definition of what is meant by the term “core cognitive processes.” These assumptions in contemporary sport practice are based on the default approach of indirect perception underpinning sport psychologists’ attempts to describe and develop specific processes, such as perception, anticipation, attention, memory, and decisionmaking, by exposing performers to selectively adapt and modify displays such as still images, short video clips, and snapshots of performance environments (Araújo et al, 2017). These ideas are somewhat aligned with those in an embodied framework of cognition (e.g., Moreau et al, 2015) outlining the inter-relations between motor and cognitive processes, emphasizing that motor (cognitive) system involvement depends on specific cognitive (motor) interactions with a performance environment
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