Volume 3, Issue 3

In an article published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, François Osiurak and Emanuelle Reynaud (2019) have proposed a new framework to understand cumulative technological culture (CTC). They define CTC as an increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations (e.g., Boyd et al., 2011; Richerson & Boyd, 2008), which distinguishes humans from other species. Two concepts seem to be central to explain CTC (Legare & Nielsen, 2015): imitation and innovation. According to Osiurak and Reynaud, previous researchers (e.g., Dean et al., 2012; Lewis & Laland, 2012; Tennie et al., 2009; Tomasello et al., 2005) have mainly focused their attention on the former to explain CTC. Although the authors do not deny the importance of imitation, which is necessary to pass on the content of technical information, they champion the idea that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills instead of in social cognitive skills. They argue that CTC emerges uniquely because a non-social cognitive structure (i.e., technical reasoning) enables humans to acquire and develop the content. In this article I will not argue against this hypothesis; instead I will focus on two points that draw on memory expertise. The first one concerns the distinction between cognitive structure and content on which the authors base their argumentation. The second point is related to humans’ unique capacity to imitate a combination of interdependent mechanical actions, which is explained by Wynn and Coolidge (2007) through an enhancement of working memory (WM).

Skill acquisition principles are crucial to prepare athletes for superior performance in sport, but, in training athletes, coaches have focused less on these principles than they have on the design of training. This paper provides an overview of how a skill acquisition specialist disseminated scientific knowledge to amateur and professional coaches and initiated collaboration to improve practice design. First, a framework of representative task design is outlined, which considers perception and action components of sports skills in practice tasks relative to the competition setting. Second, with elite tennis as an example, steps are described as to how the skill acquisition specialist can initiate collaboration with coaches to evaluate practice tasks and make recommendations using representative task design. This approach includes delivery of a seminar to educate coaches, observation of practice tasks to rate representative task design with recommendations made, and factors identified by coaches that should be considered when applying skill acquisition principles. Factors identified by coaches related to presentation of anticipatory cues, practice variability, individualization of practice, skill complexity, and consistency of skill tests. Collectively, this paper provides insight into how skill acquisition specialists can collaborate with coaches to disseminate knowledge, and it presents some of the challenges and solutions of designing representative practice tasks in sport.

Understanding performance of athletes in competition is required for enhancing the quality of how athletes co-adapt to the specific, changing constraints of those environments. In long jumping, for example, an athlete must co-adapt with these constraints while also meeting the challenging accuracy demands of the sport. Examining then how long jumpers with different levels of expertise navigate the competition environment is important. This analysis is necessary, given evidence from motor learning research showing that individuals with higher levels of expertise use different sources of information to guide their performance behaviors. In this study, key gait variables during the long jump run-up were recorded during performance at 8 competitions in the 2015 and 2016 Australian track and field seasons to examine the visual control strategies of athletes differing in expertise levels, when performing legal and foul jumps. No statistically significant differences were observed between jumpers differing in levels of expertise when comparing gait patterns in foul and legal jumps. However, different footfall variability curves did emerge that can advance current understanding of long jump run-ups. International-level athletes exhibited higher levels of functional variability during the initial phases of the run-up of legal jumps, with step adjustments spread across the whole of the run-up, compared to National-level athletes. Since athletes of lower levels of expertise exhibited a more stereotyped run-up profile, it is suggested that coaches and practitioners encourage more exploration in training of this group by incorporating increased levels of representative variability during practice. From a practical perspective, increasing variability in practice contexts could encourage National-level athletes to explore different movement solutions and (re)calibrate actions to changing environmental demands, providing more representative simulations of the competition environment.