Search

Self-Confrontation Micro-Phenomenological Interviews (SCMPIs) aim to capture the fine-grained details of an athlete's experience, focusing on pre-reflective consciousness without resorting to post-hoc rationalizations. This specific type of self-confrontation interview was developed in the domain of work analysis in cognitive ergonomics. Despite its integration into numerous research studies in sport performance and training practices, the direct effects of the SCMPI on athletes remain underexplored. In this perspective article, we provide a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of SCMPI as well as a description of the paradox of the SCMPI situation. Throughout this paper, we highlight the unsolved questions around use of SCMPIs to improve athletes' performance by enhancing reflective thinking as well as pre-reflective awareness. Furthermore, we discuss the epistemological and practical considerations regarding the selection and use of activity traces in SCMPIs. The paper calls for further research to evaluate the SCMPI's impact on performance in elite athletes, emphasizing the need for a rational application of this method in both research and practical interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-Confrontation Micro-Phenomenological Interviews (SCMPIs) aim to capture the fine-grained details of an athlete's experience, focusing on pre-reflective consciousness without resorting to post-hoc rationalizations. This specific type of self-confrontation interview was developed in the domain of work analysis in cognitive ergonomics. Despite its integration into numerous research studies in sport performance and training practices, the direct effects of the SCMPI on athletes remain underexplored. In this perspective article, we provide a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of SCMPI as well as a description of the paradox of the SCMPI situation. Throughout this paper, we highlight the unsolved questions around use of SCMPIs to improve athletes' performance by enhancing reflective thinking as well as pre-reflective awareness. Furthermore, we discuss the epistemological and practical considerations regarding the selection and use of activity traces in SCMPIs. The paper calls for further research to evaluate the SCMPI's impact on performance in elite athletes, emphasizing the need for a rational application of this method in both research and practical interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on research examining the coordination between basketball players during an official game. Analysis of articulations of typical individual concerns revealed three forms of articulation which are divergence, convergence and partial convergence. Findings suggested that the convergence of individual concerns is not always needed for effective basketball team coordination. Temporal and local linkages appear to be enough to engender effectiveness as a team.

Traditional theories of motor learning emphasize the automaticity of skillful actions. However, recent research has emphasized the role of pre-reflective self-consciousness accompanying skillful action execution. In the present paper, we present the course-of-experience framework as a means of studying elite athletes' pre-reflective self-consciousness in the unfolding activity of performance optimization. We carried out a synthetic presentation of the ontological and epistemological foundation of this framework. Then we illustrated the methodology by an in-depth analysis of two elite windsurfers' courses of experience. The analysis of global and local characteristics of the riders' courses of experience reveal (a) the meaningful activities accompanying the experience of ongoing performance optimization; (b) the multidimensionality of attentional foci and the normativity of performance self-assessment; and (c) a micro-scale phenomenological description of continuous improvement. These results highlight the fruitfulness of the course-of-experience framework to describe the experience of being absorbed in an activity of performance optimization., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Terrien, Huet, Iachkine and Saury.)

A current trend in sailing sports is the use of boats equipped with hydrofoils, allowing the boats to "fly" over the water surface. In this situation, the handling of the boat requires fine coordination between the crew members to maintain the precarious flight. The purpose of this case study was to analyze the crew activity on a flying multihull and explore the role of the shared sport equipment in the emergence of coordination between crew members. Data were collected during a training session with a crew of expert sailors. A joint analysis of phenomenological and mechanical data was conducted. The aim of the analysis was to categorize the forms of interactions between crew members, boat and environment. Results showed that collective coordination in the studied situation involves six forms of interaction that are associated with stable, unstable or critical states of the flight. Consequently, we discussed the role played by the crew members, the behavior of the boat and the environment in the collective coordination., (© Journal of Sports Science and Medicine.)

The present study is a follow-up case report of the study from R'Kiouak and colleagues (2016). From the initial study that analyzed how individual experts rowed together while they never had practiced together, we seized here the opportunity to investigate how both rowers synchronize after having intensively practiced joint action through a national training program in which they were invited to take part. The joint action of 2 individual expert rowers, which composed a coxless pair crew, was tracked on-the-water at the end of a team-training program. We first determined how each rower experienced the joint action at each instance of oars' strokes during a 12min race. A phenomenological analysis evidenced several categories of how rowers shared lived experiences of their joint action. From mechanical data captured through an automatic recording device, we then scrutinized the mechanical signatures that correlated with each phenomenological sample. By comparing the present case report to the initial study, results suggested that, after the training program (a) rowers shared more meaningful experience of their joint action, and (b) only the boat velocity's index contributed to explain why oars stroke were alternatively lived as effective or detrimental. The present case report thus suggests that joint action training in rowing might imply an increase in the joint sense-making activities, probably associated with a change from an inter-personal to an extra-personal meaningful mode of co-regulation of the joint action., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The principal aim of this study was to examine the impact of variability in interpersonal coordination and individual organization on rowing performance. The second aim was to analyze crew phenomenology in order to understand how rowers experience their joint actions when coping with constraints emerging from the race. We conducted a descriptive and exploratory study of two coxless pair crews during a 3000-m rowing race against the clock. As the investigation was performed in an ecological context, we postulated that our understanding of the behavioral dynamics of interpersonal coordination and individual organization and the variability in performance would be enriched through the analysis of crew phenomenology. The behavioral dynamics of individual organization were assessed at kinematic and kinetic levels, and interpersonal coordination was examined by computing the relative phase between oar angles and oar forces and the difference in the oar force impulse of the two rowers. The inter-cycle variability of the behavioral dynamics of one international and one national crew was evaluated by computing the root mean square and the Cauchy index. Inter-cycle variability was considered significantly high when the behavioral and performance data for each cycle were outside of the confidence interval. Crew phenomenology was characterized on the basis of self-confrontation interviews and the rowers' concerns were then analyzed according to course-of-action methodology to identify the shared experiences. Our findings showed that greater behavioral variability could be either " perturbing " or " functional " depending on its impact on performance (boat velocity); the rowers experienced it as sometimes meaningful and sometimes meaningless; and their experiences were similar or diverging. By combining phenomenological and behavioral data, we explain how constraints not manipulated by an experimenter but emerging from the ecological context of a race can be associated with functional adaptations or perturbations of the interpersonal coordination.

The purpose of this study was to understand how a single pair of expert individual rowers experienced their crew functioning in natural conditions when asked to practice a joint movement for the first time. To fulfill this objective, we conducted a field study of interpersonal coordination that combined phenomenological and mechanical data from a coxless pair activity, to analyze the dynamics of the (inter)subjective experience compared with the dynamics of the team coordination. Using an enactivist approach to social couplings, these heterogeneous data were combined to explore the salience (and accuracy) of individuals' shared experiences of their joint action. First, we determined how each rower experienced the continuous crew functioning states (e.g., feelings of the boat's glide). Second, the phenomenological data helped us to build several categories of oar strokes (i.e., cycles), experienced by the rowers as either detrimentally or effectively performed strokes. Third, the mechanical signatures that correlated with each phenomenological category were tracked at various level of organization (i.e., individual-, interpersonal-, and boat-levels). The results indicated that (a) the two rowers did not pay attention to their joint action during most of the cycles, (b) some cycles were simultaneously lived as a salient, meaningful experience of either a detrimental (n = 15 cycles) or an effective (n = 18 cycles) joint action, and (c) the mechanical signatures diverged across the delineated phenomenological categories, suggesting that the way in which the cycles were experienced emerged from the variance in some mechanical parameters (i.e., differences in peak force level and mean force). Notably, the mechanical measures that helped to explain differences within the phenomenological categories were found at the interpersonal level of analysis, thus suggesting an intentional inter-personal mode of regulation of their joint action. This result is further challenged and discussed in light of extra-personal regulation processes that might concurrently explain why participants did not make an extensive salient experience of their joint action. We conclude that attempts to combine phenomenological and mechanical data should be pursued to continue the research on how individuals regulate the effectiveness of their joint actions' dynamics.

This study analyzed the activity of expert table tennis players during a match, in reference to course of action theory (Theureau, 1992). Matches were videotaped, and the players' verbalizations as they viewed the tapes were collected a posteriori. The data was analyzed by (a) transcribing the players' actions and verbalizations, (b) decomposing their activity into elementary units of meaning, and (c) grouping the elementary units into larger sets. The results showed that the matches began with an inquiry into the specific features of the opponent's play. This was followed by reproducing the actions identified as effective during the inquiry. The results are discussed in relation to the role of training in expert performance.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the practical knowledge of expert sailing coaches of the French team preparing for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Coaching knowledge was studied from a cognitive ergonomics perspective based on the task activity model. According to this model, a task is a set of constraints facing individuals. To meet the demands imposed by these constraints, an individual engages in an adaptative activity which can be studied from the point of view of his or her knowledge and cognitive operating modes. In-depth interviews were conducted after observation of five training sessions, and the verbal protocols obtained were coded inductively. The results showed that coaching tasks were considered by coaches as a set of interacting constraints which generate complex, contradictory, and ill defined problems. Coaches' operating modes appeared to be based on organization routines, cognitive anticipation on flexible plans, flexible on-site adaptation, joint control of training with athletes, and involvement in the training situation based on past experiences.