Evaluating weaknesses of "perceptual-cognitive training" and "brain training" methods in sport: An ecological dynamics critique

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" can be considered together as part of a process training approach proposing enhanced cognitive and perceptual skills and brain capacity to support performance in everyday life activities, including sport. For example, the "process training industry" promotes the idea that playing games not only makes you a better player but also makes you smarter, more alert, and a faster learner. In this position paper, we critically evaluate the effectiveness of both types of process training programmes in generalizing transfer to sport performance. These issues are addressed in three stages. First, we evaluate empirical evidence in support of perceptual-cognitive process training and its application to enhancing sport performance. Second, we critically review putative modularized mechanisms underpinning this kind of training, addressing limitations and subsequent problems. Specifically, we consider merits of this highly specific form of training, which focuses on training of isolated processes such as cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking) and visual perception processes, separately from performance behaviors and actions. We conclude that these approaches may, at best, provide some "general transfer" of underlying processes to specific sport environments, but lack "specificity of transfer" to contextualize actual performance behaviors. A major weakness of process training methods is their focus on enhancing the performance in body "modules" (e.g., eye, brain, memory, anticipatory sub-systems). What is lacking is evidence on how these isolated components are modified and subsequently interact with other process "modules," which are considered to underlie sport performance. Finally, we propose how an ecological dynamics approach, aligned with an embodied framework of cognition undermines the rationale that modularized processes can enhance performance in competitive sport. An ecological dynamics perspective proposes that the body is a complex adaptive system, interacting with performance environments in a functionally integrated manner, emphasizing that the inter-relation between motor processes, cognitive and perceptual functions, and the constraints of a sport task is best understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis

Neural systems supporting navigation

Highlights: • Recent neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have begun to shed light on the neural dynamics of navigation systems. • Computational models have advanced theories of how entorhinal grid cells and hippocampal place cells might serve navigation. • Hippocampus and entorhinal cortex provide complementary representations of routes and vectors for navigation. Much is known about how neural systems determine current spatial position and orientation in the environment. By contrast little is understood about how the brain represents future goal locations or computes the distance and direction to such goals. Recent electrophysiology, computational modelling and neuroimaging research have shed new light on how the spatial relationship to a goal may be determined and represented during navigation. This research suggests that the hippocampus may code the path to the goal while the entorhinal cortex represents the vector to the goal. It also reveals that the engagement of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex varies across the different operational stages of navigation, such as during travel, route planning, and decision-making at waypoints

Solving the detour problem in navigation: a model of prefrontal and hippocampal interactions.

Adapting behavior to accommodate changes in the environment is an important function of the nervous system. A universal problem for motile animals is the discovery that a learned route is blocked and a detour is required. Given the substantial neuroscience research on spatial navigation and decision-making it is surprising that so little is known about how the brain solves the detour problem. Here we review the limited number of relevant functional neuroimaging, single unit recording and lesion studies. We find that while the prefrontal cortex (PFC) consistently responds to detours, the hippocampus does not. Recent evidence suggests the hippocampus tracks information about the future path distance to the goal. Based on this evidence we postulate a conceptual model in which: Lateral PFC provides a prediction error signal about the change in the path, frontopolar and superior PFC support the re-formulation of the route plan as a novel subgoal and the hippocampus simulates the new path. More data will be required to validate this model and understand (1) how the system processes the different options; and (2) deals with situations where a new path becomes available (i.e., shortcuts)

THE BORDER BETWEEN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY- SEGMENTATION BASED ON CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR

In today’s economy, marketers have been facing two challenging trends: fierce competition between companies offering essentially similar products, and dealing with customers that are increasingly informed and demanding, but less and less loyal. Under these conditions, it has become imperative for managers and for marketing professionals to invest in business intelligence in order to find patterns in the consumers’ behavior that could predict their future buying decisions. In this report we have presented how Decision Support Systems, data analysis and customer segmentation can help companies to know their customers better in order to predict (and influence) their future actions. At the same time, we have argued that Business Intelligence should meet psychology and neurology halfway, and accept that there is a very high emotional subconscious component that produces a high degree of unpredictability in consumers’ behavior.DSS, business intelligence, consumer behavior, segmentation, buying decision process

Overcoming Roadblocks to Learning

{Excerpt} The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organization and the state of affairs in typical bilateral and multilateral development agencies remains huge. Defining roadblocks, however numerous they may be, is half the battle to removing them—it might make them part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Organizational learning is collective learning by individuals, and the fundamental phenomena of individual learning apply to organizations. However, organizational learning has distinctive characteristics concerning what is learned, how it is learned, and the adjustments needed to enhance learning. These owe to the fact that an organization is, by general definition, a collective whose individual constituents work to achieve a common goal from discrete operating and supporting units. Practices bring different perspectives and cultures to bear and shape data, information, and knowledge flows. Political considerations are the most serious impediment to becoming a learning organization. However, by understanding more fully what obstacles to learning can exist in a complex organization in a complex environment, one can circumscribe the problem space and create enabling environments for a more positive future. Such environments would facilitate self-organization, exploration of the space of possibilities, generative feedback, emergence, and coevolution.They would create an explanatory framework and facilitate action

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 341)

This bibliography lists 133 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during September 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance