Abstract
Similar to other complex systems in nature (e.g., a hunting pack, flocks of birds), sports teams have been modeled as social neurobiological systems in which interpersonal coordination tendencies of agents underpin team swarming behaviors. Swarming is seen as the result of agent co-adaptation to ecological constraints of performance environments by collectively perceiving specific possibilities for action (affordances for self and shared affordances). A major principle of invasion team sports assumed to promote effective performance is to outnumber the opposition (creation of numerical overloads) during different performance phases (attack and defense) in spatial regions adjacent to the ball. Such performance principles are assimilated by system agents through manipulation of numerical relations between teams during training in order to create artificially asymmetrical performance contexts to simulate overloaded and underloaded situations. Here we evaluated effects of different numerical relations differentiated by agent skill level, examining emergent inter-individual, intra- and inter-team coordination. Groups of association football players (national – NLP and regional-level – RLP) participated in small-sided and conditioned games in which numerical relations between system agents were manipulated (5v5, 5v4 and 5v3). Typical grouping tendencies in sports teams (major ranges, stretch indices, distances of team centers to goals and distances between the teams' opposing line-forces in specific team sectors) were recorded by plotting positional coordinates of individual agents through continuous GPS tracking. Results showed that creation of numerical asymmetries during training constrained agents' individual dominant regions, the underloaded teams' compactness and each team's relative position on-field, as well as distances between specific team sectors. We also observed how skill level impacted individual and team coordination tendencies. Data revealed emergence of co-adaptive behaviors between interacting neurobiological social system agents in the context of sport performance. Such observations have broader implications for training design involving manipulations of numerical relations between interacting members of social collectives.
Highlights
Collective organizational principles underlying emergence of functional behaviors have been identified in many groups of biological organisms [1,2]
Data from this study shed important insights on co-adaptive behaviors of agents in team sport systems performing under specific task constraints afforded by different numerical relations and skill levels in small-sided and conditioned games (SSCGs)
Individual and team coordination tendencies were clearly constrained by the numerical relations between competing teams and the players’ skill level
Summary
Collective organizational principles underlying emergence of functional behaviors have been identified in many groups of biological organisms (e.g., flocks of birds, wolf packs, ant colonies) [1,2]. Human groups can be considered as swarming superorganisms when individuals cooperate and coordinate their actions together to achieve common collective goals [4] This sociobiological perspective can help explain various social-psychological phenomena such as the organization of labor by workers in a factory, how a traffic jam arises or the interpersonal rhythmic movements characterizing human activities like dancing or marching together. This approach has been implemented to understand how interacting individuals coordinate their movements by detecting sensory information like the visual movement of others (see [5,6,7,8] as examples). Joint actions in the human performance domain of team sports has not received the same amount of empirical attention [9]
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