Dynamics of Experience in a Learning Protocol: A Case Study in Climbing

Promoting Exploration During Learning: Effect of Imposed and Self-Controlled Practice Schedules on Learners' Behavioral Flexibility

Purpose: Enriching learners' motor repertoires in a complex pluri-articular task, such as climbing, could help learners' adaptation to various sets of task constraints. Promoting exploration with variable practice conditions is one solution recurrently proposed. However, recent studies have shown that a too elevated exploration-exploitation ratio during practice could impair learning. A proposed solution is to give learners some control over their practice schedule, which appeared to better respect the individual learning dynamic in comparison to the usual experimenter-imposed practice schedule. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate whether giving learners the possibility of controlling when to confront to new climbing routes would result in greater flexibility in their motor repertoire compared to giving them an imposed schedule of climbing routes or a constant practice condition. Method: Participants were assigned to either a constant practice group (CPG), an imposed-variability group (IVG) or a self-controlled variability group (SVG) to carry out a climbing task. To assess participants' behavioral flexibility, a scanning procedure was conceived by manipulating the route design and the instructions. Results: Participants showed an initial lack of flexibility as they strongly relied on a single coordination pattern. At posttest and retention, the three groups more frequently used a new hand coordination pattern and more often showed coordination patterns associated with high climbing fluency. Results suggest that the individualized rate of exploration in the self-controlled practice condition may have helped the learners improve their flexibility, whereas forcing exploration did not seem more beneficial than constant practice in this complex pluri-articular task.

Exploring in a climbing task during a learning protocol: a complex sense-making process

In perceptual-motor learning, constant and variable practice conditions have been found to have differential effects on learners' exploratory activity and their ability to transfer their skills to novel environments. However, how learners make sense of these practice conditions during practice remains unclear. This study aimed to analyse learners' experiences of different practice conditions during a climbing learning protocol and to examine how these experiences might further inform learners' exploratory activity. Twelve participants assigned to either 'Constant practice', 'Imposed Novelty', or 'Chosen novelty' groups climbed a 'Control route' (i.e. a route common to all groups) and a 'transfer route' (i.e. a new route) before and after a ten session learning protocol. Descriptions of learners' experiences during previews and climbs were collected using self-confrontation interviews. After identifying general dimensions via a thematic analysis, a hierarchical cluster analysis on these general dimensions allowed the identification of phenomenological clusters (PhC). The distribution of these PhCs was compared between the first and last learning sessions, the control and transfer routes, and the practice condition groups. We identified seven PhCs reflecting learners' meaningful exploratory activity during the previews and climbs. Significant differences in the distribution of these PhCs were found between (i) the first and the last session, (ii) the control and the transfer route and (iii) the Chosen-novelty group and the other two practice groups. These results suggest that exploration is part of a complex sense-making process linked to practice conditions, which can be described by a joint analysis of the intentions, perceptions and actions.

Navigating in the Gray Area of Coach-Athlete Relationships in Sports: Toward an In-depth Analysis of the Dynamics of Athlete Maltreatment Experiences

Several studies have revealed the abusive behaviors directed against athletes in various sports contexts, but knowledge about the processes by which the athletes realize and accept or reject maltreatment is underdeveloped. Thus, it is difficult to establish a solid scientific basis for characterizing the mechanisms of maltreatment from the athletes' perspective regarding the forms of maltreatment they endure and the impact on their performance and wellbeing. The main goals of this paper are to show how the enactive approach (including theoretical assumptions and methodological standards) can meet these challenges, as it is well-suited to (a) describe the evolving interactions between athletes and the sports situations that lead to maltreatment (i.e., navigating in the gray area of coach-athlete relationships), (b) identify those alert landmarks that help us assess the level of risk of athlete maltreatment, and (c) provide concrete guidelines to prevent and deal with sports-related maltreatment. We illustrate our approach by a case study that examines the experience of a retired high-level boxer who faced several forms of maltreatment. Our results reveal a dynamic change in the interactions between the boxer and the maltreatment situations that led her through (a) Acceptance (i.e., future-oriented positive involvement), (b) Regulation attempt (i.e., negative feelings about weight loss, exhaustion and loneliness, questioning the compromise between performance and health, acceptance and loneliness), (c) Distancing (i.e., reopening to others) and (d) Rejection (i.e., rebellion and the decision to stand up to her coach and leave). Based on our results, we present concrete guidelines to prevent and address sports-related maltreatment, with four progressive alert landmarks that help situate the athlete in the gray area of coach-athlete relationships and suggest a “timeline” of maltreatment escalation with key warnings.

Creative Togetherness. A Joint-Methods Analysis of Collaborative Artistic Performance

In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self-assessment instrument was administered to rate the different aspects of togetherness emerging from their collective activity; second, interviews based on video recordings of their performance were conducted individually with all team members; and third, the performance was evaluated by external artistic swimming experts. By combining these levels of analysis in different ways, we explore how changes in togetherness and lived experience in individual behavior may shape, disrupt, and (re-)stabilize joint performance. Our findings suggest that the experience of being and acting together is transient and changing, often alternating phases of decrease and increase in felt togetherness that can be consistently recognized by swimmers and external raters.

The Ecological Dynamics Framework: An Innovative Approach to Performance in Extreme Environments: A Narrative Review

(1) Background: Uncertainty in extreme sports performance environments, such as climbing, provides considerable psycho-emotional and physiological demands, notably due to the many different environments in which climbing can be performed. This variety of environments, conditions of practice and engagement would challenge the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills; (2) Methods: To better understand how perceptual-motor skills are controlled and acquired in climbing, we proposed a narrative review anchored in the ecological dynamics theoretical framework and showed how this theoretical framework would support a nonlinear pedagogy to skill acquisition and to design safe learning and training situations that are representative of extreme performance contexts; (3) Results: We explained three theoretical pillars and we provide examples for design intervention following nonlinear pedagogy, notably (i) to set a constraint-led approach (in particular task constraint), (ii) to implement conditions of practice (constant vs. variable, imposed vs. self-controlled), (iii) to promote adaptive and creative behavioral variability during practice; (4) Conclusions: The challenge for the extreme sport practitioner is how to set up conditions of practice for efficient exploration in a manner that manages the dangers of performing in uncertain environments. Representing uncertainty within the relative safety of indoor settings may be one approach for preparing climbers for performance in extreme environments.