Araújo, D., & Davids, K. (2011). What exactly is acquired during skill acquisition?. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(3-4), 7-23.

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Goes through what traditionally ‘Skill Acquisition’ is thought to be and contrasts it with what Skill Acquisition looks like from an Ecological Dynamics perspective
2. The article then explains how skill is acquired through an Ecological Dynamics rationale
3. It finishes by suggesting that ‘Skill Attunement’ or ‘Skill Adaptation’ would be more suitable terms

🤝Impressions

This is one of the must read papers for anyone that is interested in Skill Acquisition. There is so much great information in it and it will definitely help improve your own coaching. It’s not a paper that you read once, every time you go through it you will pick up on something different

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Attunement and Calibration are very tightly linked. Better attunement will lead to better calibration of actions
• Think more about all the different constraints that could be effecting the player
• Behaviour emerges from the “confluence of constraints under the boundary conditions of a particular task or activity context”
• The behaviour may be adaptable but they are achieving the task goal consistently
• It’s through exploration that performer’s become more ‘perceptually attuned’. They learn through experience in the environment what the ‘specifying information’ will be
• ‘Intentions’ are the most important constraint.
• Think of affordances as ‘Key Ecological Constraints’
• ‘What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental, as we are accustomed to believe… The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either’-James Gibson
• Skill is specific to an environment.
• Skill is constantly adjusting on both micro and macro scales. There isn’t an end point per se

🖐 Who should read it?

All coaches, teacher’s, parents etc. This is a must read paper and if you can understand the concepts in the paper it will change the way you coach for the better :)