Duarte Araujo

University of Lisbon | UL · Faculdade de Motricidade Humana (Human Kinetics)

Expert decision-making can be directly assessed, if sport action is understood as an expression of embedded and embodied cognition. Here, we discuss evidence for this claim, starting with a critical review of research literature on the perceptual-cognitive basis for expertise. In reviewing how performance and underlying processes are conceived and...

Background: Expertise has been extensively studied in several sports over recent years. The specificities of how excellence is achieved in Association Football, a sport practiced worldwide, are being repeatedly investigated by many researchers through a variety of approaches and scientific disciplines. Objective: The aim of this review was to id...

Objectives: Evidence suggests that ‘green exercise’ (defined as physical activity in nature's environments) provides an important context for health-enhancing physical activity (HEPA), offering opportunities for (mental) health and well-being outcomes, compared to urban/manufactured environments. Theoretical explanations for HEPA tend to emphasize...

Information technology has been integrated into most areas of sport, providing new insights, improving the efficiency of operational processes, and offering unique opportunities for exploration and inquiry. While acknowledging this positive impact, this paper explores whether sufficient consideration has been directed towards what technology risks...

Athletes act intentionally and adaptively for achieving task goals in sport performance environments. The ecological dynamics approach to decision making understands the performer‐environment system as the unit of analysis to understand behavior, where action is not just limited to processes occurring in the individual (e.g., information-processing...

This review presents a replication analysis that seeks to look at single nucleotide genetic polymorphisms (SNPs) that have been associated with anterior cruciate ligament rupture (ACLR) in more than two independent cohorts. We presented a genotypic map and established the alleles that may play a protective role in the injury. Similarly, components...

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on developing motor skills through an ecological dynamics approach. This approach integrates insights from various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and physiology to understand the relationship between individuals and their environment. However, traditional sports training methods often a...

Comparisons of the beneficial effects of nature-based versus indoor physical activity have been extensively reported, but existing research addresses mainly aerobic activity (running, jogging), not resistance or mixed (aerobic and resistance) exercise. It is unclear if the psychological benefits extend to functionality, i.e., if participants perfor...

Identifying key processes and their actors is a task of great importance in enquiring or assessing systems performance. This quest is particularly relevant and challenging when the system is highly dynamic, that being the case of matches involving sport teams. In this chapter these dynamics are associated to different types of interactions between...

Philosopher-activist Heather Menzies advocates for an approach to ecological literacy that goes beyond knowing about the interconnected goings on of the world from afar by foregrounding the import of relating with a locale through prolonged periods of implicated participation. Here, we offer further insight to these views across three sections. Fir...

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on developing motor skills through an ecological dynamics approach. This approach integrates insights from various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and physiology to understand the relationship between individuals and their environment. However, traditional sports training methods often a...

In our societally extractive age, sport science risks being swept up in the intensifying desire to commodify the experiences of those that scientists proclaim to study. Coupled with the techno-digital revolution, this stems from a vertical (onto)logic that frames the sporting landscape as a static space filled with discrete objects waiting for us t...

Introduction. Based on Shoemaker's model of gatekeeping, this study addresses two questions: What social representations of sports are promoted by the prime time news program of the public television broadcaster Radio Televisão Portuguesa (RTP)? How do editors assess sports news stories during the editorial decision-making process? Material and Met...

From a scientific perspective, talent inclusion for the purposes of development is the most promising path for the use of genetic testing, requiring an enhanced scientific literacy of sports organisation decision-makers, making them less vulnerable to the FOMO effect. The mainstream inflated importance of genetic testing exemplifies an organismic...

Para os praticantes de exercício, os constrangimentos típicos dos ambientes indoor (e.g., chão liso e condições climáticas estáveis), e os constrangimentos da natureza (e.g., solo irregular e condições climáticas variáveis) são fundamentalmente diferentes. Estes diferentes contextos podem influenciar o modo como cada mesma tarefa é realizada. No en...

This systematic review organizes the literature regarding the influence of contextual constraints on football match action profiles, in order to inform better practice when utilized a data-informed approach towards identifying and predicting high performing football players. Furthermore, the validity of examining “on-ball” match actions in competit...

For exercisers, typical indoor constraints (e.g., flat ground, stable climate conditions), and nature’s constraints (e.g., irregular ground, variable climate conditions) are fundamentally different, which may influence exercise behavior in complex, functionally distinct ways, when performing similar tasks (Araújo et al., 2019). However, there is a...

From an ecological dynamics perspective, careful manipulation of task constraints can provide opportunities for action, exploited by functional movement variability of participants. The constraints-led approach (CLA) induces functional movement variability in practice designs, supporting athlete performance in satisfying task constraints and findin...

In this article we aim to define and present the complementary nature of talent, skill and expertise. Human daily life is replete with expressions of skillful behaviours while interacting with the world, which in specific socio-culturally defined domains, such as sport and work, demand a specialization of such ubiquitous skill. Certain manifestatio...

Purpose The present study examined the relationship between playing style adaptability and team match performance indicators throughout the season. Three playing style adaptability metrics were analysed, namely, (1) flexibility (i.e., exhibiting a wide range of playing styles), (2) reactivity (i.e., adapting playing style based on opposition) and (...

The modification of child-sports aims to develop an optimal learning environment that facilitates the emergence of desirable psychological outcomes (e.g., self-efficacy). The aim of the study was to assess the effect of reducing net height and court size on self-efficacy and shot-efficacy of U-10 tennis players in a real-game context. Twenty U-10 t...

Football performance behaviour relies on the individual and collective perceptual attunement to the opportunities for action (affordances) available in a given competitive environment. Such perception–action coupling is constrained by players’ spatial dominance. Aiming to understand the influence of team formation and players’ roles in their dynami...

Background Match analysis has evolved exponentially over the past decades in team sports resulting in a significant number of published systematic reviews and meta-analyses. An umbrella review of the available literature is needed to provide an integrated overview of current knowledge and contribute to more robust theoretical explanations of team p...

What would it mean to consider research in the sport sciences as a sustainable practice? Taking a step back, in such a context, what would sustainability even mean? The time is ripe to address such questions, and what we lay out here are our initial thoughts on this most contemporary of issues. We start by exploring what is meant by the term ‘susta...

A constraints-led approach (CLA), based on an ecological dynamics rationale for athlete learning and development has been applied to analyses of individual and team sports. To date, such an approach has yet to be applied to the learning of coaches. Here, we propose how applying a CLA in education and professional development programmes can shape em...

The target article promotes an enactive approach to human behaviour, highlighting the phenomenology of agent-environment coupling, and is rooted in the course of experience from pre-reflective self-consciousness. In our comment we debate the idea that experience does equate with subjectivity. Such an equation reflects an organismic asymmetry locati...

La Feeling Scale y la Felt Arousal Scale son escalas ampliamente utilizadas en la investigación del deporte. En este estudio, las escalas originales fueron traducidas del inglés al portugués. Posteriormente, se comprobó si las puntuaciones de afecto y activación en el Self-Assessment Manikin, una escala basada en imágenes, predecían las puntuacione...

The latest World Health Organization report on green and blue space and mental health (2021) calls for greater, and better, urban nature environments, i. e., “wilder” urban parks, tree-laden sidewalks, and overall presence of nature in the urban environment. Evidence shows that living close to and interacting with nature promotes benefits to numero...

This chapter presents an ecological dynamics approach to conceptualizing affordances in the context of sports to understand the acquisition of skilled behaviors. Ecological dynamics is a multidisciplinary framework anchored in the sciences of complex systems, framed by concepts in ecological psychology and nonlinear dynamics, for analyzing behavior...

Scientists and sport practitioners widely recognize the importance of visual information for soccer player’s performance. While previous research has highlighted the usefulness of spatial vision occlusion googles to enhance the performance of typical soccer skills (e.g., passing) [1], no evidence is available in youth soccer players. The purpose of...

A common belief is that closed self-paced motor tasks enable the per-former to “activate” a pre-prepared plan to (re)produce actions, despite top performers underperforming at “big” moments. Elite athletes and players seem incapable of repeating a movement pattern, despite having “plenty of time to prepare and ‘run-off’ their well-drilled, standard...

A common belief is that closed self-paced motor tasks enable the per-former to “activate” a pre-prepared plan to (re)produce actions, despite top performers underperforming at “big” moments. Elite athletes and players seem incapable of repeating a movement pattern, despite having “plenty of time to prepare and ‘run-off’ their well-drilled, standard...

What should professional development of knowledge and skills of academic sport scientists look like? We address this question by first dwelling in what ‘being a professional academic’ entails. Professionals work methodically, typically specialising their knowledge and skills while strategically planning how to progress their careers, often not rock...

Self-regulation of learning (SRL) in sports has received much attention from sport sciences researchers. Zimmerman's theory of SRL is frequently used in sport psychology, which, in turn, is derived from the social cognitive theory of self-regulation developed by Bandura. Despite all the contributions to the domain of expertise in general, and sport...

Education measures put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic to mitigate learning loss among students has triggered scientific exploration of mentorship, hybrid, and virtual learning spaces in the context of talent development. In fact, a cursory search of the terms: ‘talent development,’ ‘education,’ ‘hybrid learning,’ and ‘virtual learning’ yield...

Background: The behaviours of golfers could be interpreted as emergent, resulting from the cyclical relations of perception-action couplings established under the interacting constraints of competitive performance environments. Underpinned by an ecological dynamics approach, the aim of this study was to investigate how a simple adaptation of ta...

The purpose of this study was to characterise perturbations created from the baseline in men’s tennis following Barker’s ecological psychology approach. In selected rallies of expert level tennis matches we identified the shot responsible for this perturbation and characterised it using a sequential approach based on the positioning of the players...

Cognition plays a key role in sports performance. This meta-analytic review synthesizes research that examined the relationship between cognitive functions, skills, and sports performance. We identified literature by searching Cochrane Library, APA PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science. We included studies conducted on competitive athletes, assessed...

In this article, we present an original method to measure the rate of positional change observed during a soccer match based on the relative spatial distribution of players on the pitch. This is justified as players use their relative position as a key tactical tool to contribute to their team’s objectives. A temporal network representation of the...

Bernstein's (1996) levels of movement organization includes tonus, the muscular-contraction level that primes individual movement systems for (re)organizing coordination patterns. The hypothesis advanced is that the tonus architecture is a multi-fractal tensegrity system, deeply reliant on haptic perception for regulating movement of an individual...

The promotion of inter- and multidisciplinarity - broadly drawing on other disciplines to help collaboratively answer important questions to the field - has been an important goal for many professional development organisations, universities, and research institutes in sport science. While welcoming collaboration, this opinion piece discusses the v...

This paper considers the study of driving skill and performance of human drivers as a key domain to improve the design and the "expertise" of self-driving cars. Concerted driving with others in roundabouts is a special kind of social expertise-understood as competence in ordinary, mundane activities-deployed by members of society. We illustrate our...

Worldwide, 1.3 billion people live in Poverty , a socio-economic status that has been identified as a key determinant of a lack of sports participation. Still, numerous athletes around the world have grown up in underprivileged socio-economic conditions. This is the case in Brazil, a country with around 13.5 million impoverished citizens, yet, over...

We modeled the dynamics of a soccer match based on a network representation where players are nodes discretely clustered into homogeneous groups. Players were grouped by physical proximity, supported by the intuitive notion that competing and same-team players use relative position as a key tactical tool to contribute to the team's objectives. The...

To understand the dynamic patterns of behaviours and interactions between athletes that characterize successful performance in different sports is an important challenge for all sport practitioners. This book guides the reader in understanding how an ecological dynamics framework for use of artificial intelligence (AI) can be implemented to interpr...

Rietveld discusses three skills that artistic practices have to offer to makers of technologies for embedding such technologies in society. An ecological dynamics model of skill learning empowers the embedding of Rietveld’s described skills in three social domains: technology makers, artworkers, and visitors of such artworks.

This study analyzes whether the relationship between serious leisure and recreation specialization differs for federated sportspeople with and without physical disabilities. Sportspeople with and without physical disabilities in the Basque Country (Spain) (n = 370) completed a questionnaire assessing the component dimensions of two constructs, “ser...

Dynamics of Skill Acquisition, Second Edition, provides an analysis of the processes underlying human skill acquisition. As the first text to outline the multidisciplinary ecological dynamics framework for understanding movement behavior, this heavily updated edition stays on the cutting edge, with principles of nonlinear pedagogy and methodologies...

In an ecological dynamics rationale, the development of expertise in sports is shaped by interactions of personal, task and environmental constraints. A notable outcome of this process is the distinctive performance styles of athletes shaped by socio-cultural-historical constraints. To understand this process, we examined the role of socio-cultural...

Collective behaviors in sports teams emerge from the coordination between players formed from their perception of shared affordances. Recent studies based on the theoretical framework of ecological dynamics reported new analytical tools to capture collective behavior variables that describe team synergies. Here, we introduce a novel hypothesis base...

The theory of Ecological Dynamics proposes that talented performance in sport emerges when an individual continuously adapts to surrounding constraints to develop an increasingly functional relationship with a specific performance environment. Crucial to this relationship is the way in which a talent development environment (conceptualized as an ec...

The question of what individual differences in working memory capacity reflect has been a topic of intensive interest in research for several decades. This research has shed light on mechanisms underlying working memory performance. At the same time, the chapter authors argue this research has been myopic in two respects. First, it has largely igno...

Where do novel and innovative ideas in sport science come from? How do researchers and practitioners collectively explore the dynamic landscape of inquiry, problem, solution and application? How do they learn to skilfully navigate from current place and practice toward the next idea located beyond their current vantage point? These questions are no...

The original anatomic schematics and lines of action were published previously (Conconi, Sancisi et al. 2019) and are used by permission of Professor Michele Conconi.

This study aimed to understand the level of agreement between different methods of observation and assessment of the performance of football referees carried out by Referee Match Observers: (i) live; (ii) live + video and (iii) single video. A total of 34 Referee Match Observers from the 1st category of the Portuguese Football Association (FA) part...

The ecological dynamics approach to interpersonal relationships provides theoretical support to the use of kinematic data, obtained with sensor-based systems, in which players of a team are linked mainly by information from the performance environment. Our goal was to capture the properties of synergic behavior in football, using spatiotemporal dat...

Surgical design in personalized medicine is often based on native anatomy, which may not accurately reflect the interaction between native musculoskeletal tissues and biomechanical artifacts. To overcome this problem, researchers have developed alternative methods based on affordance-based design. The design process can be viewed in terms of action...

Human-nature interactions have been presented as important for promoting and sustaining wellbeing and health benefits. Research has shown that pictures of nature, interacting with nature, physical activity in nature, immersion in nature and even feeling connected to nature can improve health. While considerable research supports this notion that na...

In sport performance, patterns in perceptions, actions, intentions, ideas, feelings, and thoughts continuously emerge under environmental, task, and personal constraints. This chapter summarizes advances in ecological dynamics and discusses their implications for sport psychologists. Key concepts in ecological dynamics capture the nature of skill t...

Considering soccer matches as complex systems facilitates the identification of properties that emerge from the interactions between players. Such properties include the regularities and statistical patterns that characterize couplings and sets between players established during matches. Empirical studies on the statistical distributions of number...

Interpersonal coordination is an important skill for promoting collective behavior in team sports. This study tested the impact of two types of tools in facilitating triadic coordination. 16 males aged under 12 years were divided into four groups with similar skill levels and average ages. Each group performed a three-versus-one ball passing task u...

Over two decades ago, Davids et al. (1994) and Handford et al. (1997) raised theoretical concerns associated with traditional, reductionist, and mechanistic perspectives of movement coordination and skill acquisition for sport scientists interested in practical applications for training designs. These seminal papers advocated an emerging consciousn...

The present research analyzes the relation between the height of penalty kicks in association football and (a) the probability that goalkeepers stop the ball, (b) the kinematics of the kicker, and (c) the movements of the goalkeeper. We re-analyzed movement registration data that were collected in an experiment (with professional and semi-professio...

This study investigates the factors driving football players with identical training experience and genetics to have dramatically different career paths. We studied two paired cases from a pool of 32 talented U-20 players who were twice World Champions. The first paired case is a set of monozygotic twins that played football for exactly the same pe...

Previous work has sought to explain team coordination using insights from theories of synergy formation in collective systems. Under this theoretical rationale, players are conceptualised as independent degrees of freedom, whose interactions can become coupled to produce team synergies, guided by shared affordances. Previous conceptualisation from...

Understanding team behaviours in sports performance requires understanding the interdependencies established between their levels of complexity (micro-meso-macro). Previously, most studies examined interactions emerging at micro- and macro-levels, thus neglecting those emerging at a meso-level (reveals connections between player and team levels, de...

Existe evidência para a prevalência de sintomas relacionados com o distress, ansiedade, depressão, ou abuso de substâncias de futebolistas (Gouttbarge et al., 2015), contudo pouco se sabe da realidade em Portugal. Neste sentido, o propósito do presente estudo foi identificar os principais sintomas relacionados com a perturbação mental de futebolist...

Resumo: Existe evidência para a prevalência de sintomas relacionados com o distress, ansiedade, depressão, ou abuso de substâncias de futebolistas (Gouttbarge et al., 2015), contudo pouco se sabe da realidade em Portugal. Neste sentido, o propósito do presente estudo foi identificar os principais sintomas relacionados com a perturbação mental de fu...

Promoting adherence to exercise, especially in a long-term, remains a critical issue in fitness and wellness (F&W) context. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Non-Linear Pedagogy (NLP) have progressively established themselves as valid backgrounds for intervention in F&W context. Analysing the assumptions of both, seems to reveal points of contact...

Promoting adherence to exercise, especially in a long-term, remains a critical issue in fitness and wellness (F&W) context. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Non-Linear Pedagogy (NLP) have progressively established themselves as valid backgrounds for intervention in F&W context. Analysing the assumptions of both, seems to reveal points of contact...

Research has revealed how inherent self-organizing tendencies in athletes and sports teams can be exploited to facilitate emergence of dynamical patterns in synergy formation in sports teams. Here, we discuss how game models, and associated tactical principles of play, may be implemented to constrain co-existing global-to-local and local-to-global...

Despite its importance in many academic fields, traditional scientific methodologies struggle to cope with analysis of interactions in many complex adaptive systems, including team sports. Inherent features of such systems (e.g. emergent behaviours) require a more holistic approach to measurement and analysis for understanding system properties. Co...

In this conceptual analysis contribution to the special issue on radical embodied cognition, we discuss how embodied cognition can exist with and without representations. We explore this concept through the lens of judgment and decision-making in sports (JDMS). Embodied cognition has featured in many investigations of human behavior, but no single...

Of fundamental, theoretical and practical, relevance to sport science is the conceptualisation of talent, skill and expertise. Revisiting the question of innate talent is timely, given current pressure on young children selected to specialise in sport at an early age. Here, we re-iterate the conceptualisation of talent, skill and expertise in sport...

The objective of this article is to overview the principles of the constraints-led approach and nonlinear pedagogy and how they can be applied to volleyball training. To better structure volleyball training and enhance game performance are developed the principles of representative context, task manipulation, instructions based on external focus of...

The recent upsurge in “brain training and perceptual-cognitive training,” proposing to improve isolated processes, such as brain function, visual perception, and decision-making, has created significant interest in elite sports practitioners, seeking to create an “edge” for athletes. The claims of these related “performance-enhancing industries” ca...