How hand movements and speech tip the balance in cognitive development:A story about children, complexity, coordination, and affordances

When someone asks us to explain something, such as how a lever or balance scale works, we spontaneously move our hands and gesture. This is also true for children. Furthermore, children use their hands to discover things and to find out how something works. Previous research has shown that children’s hand movements hereby are ahead of speech, and play a leading role in cognitive development. Explanations for this assumed that cognitive understanding takes place in one’s head, and that hand movements and speech (only) reflect this. However, cognitive understanding arises and consists of the constant interplay between (hand) movements and speech, and someone’s physical and social environment. The physical environment includes task properties, for example, and the social environment includes other people. Therefore, I focused on this constant interplay between hand movements, speech, and the environment, to better understand hand movements’ role in cognitive development. Using science and technology tasks, we found that children’s speech affects hand movements more than the other way around. During difficult tasks the coupling between hand movements and speech becomes even stronger than in easy tasks. Interim changes in task properties differently affect hand movements and speech. Collaborating children coordinate their hand movements and speech, and even their head movements together. The coupling between hand movements and speech is related to age and (school) performance. It is important that teachers attend to children’s hand movements and speech, and arrange their lessons and classrooms such that there is room for both

The forest through the trees:Making sense of an ecological dynamics approach to measuring and developing collective behaviour in football

In this book, we interpret the literature that has analysed football performance from a tactical standpoint using an ecological dynamics perspective. This approach focuses on the performer–environment relationship and provides a basis for understanding the dynamic nature of performance in collective team sports (1) and will be explained in detail throughout. The first section of this text will provide a brief description of association football as well as commonly used methods to analyse football performance. The next section will briefly introduce common theories and practices used to measure team behaviour, decision-making, and performance enhancement in team sport, which are then used to introduce the ecological dynamics framework. This framework will then be used to aid the application of these findings for tactical analysis in team sports such as football. Finally, we will introduce some of the scientific literature on improving team performance, particularly in reference to team coordination and decision-making. The following sections of this book will deal specifically with how small-sided games can be used to develop tactical behaviour in football. A small-sided games approach was chosen as these modified games allow for the simultaneous development of players’ technical skills, conditioning, and ability to solve and overcome tactical challenges through coordinative behaviour and effective decision-making (2-5). Small-sided games provide an environment that mimics the perception–action couplings of in situ performance, which should, in theory, improve the transferability of learned behaviours to in-game performance (4, 6). As a result, small-sided games are often used by coaches and form an integral part of this text. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for future research, and some practical considerations for coaches interested in applying the research discussed in this book

The Stance Leads the Dance: The Emergence of Role in a Joint Supra-Postural Task

Successfully meeting a shared goal usually requires co-actors to adopt complementary roles. However, in many cases, who adopts what role is not explicitly predetermined, but instead emerges as a consequence of the differences in the individual abilities and constraints imposed upon each actor. Perhaps the most basic of roles are leader and follower. Here, we investigated the emergence of “leader-follower” dynamics in inter-personal coordination using a joint supra-postural task paradigm (Ramenzoni et al., 2011; Athreya et al., 2014). Pairs of actors were tasked with holding two objects in alignment (each actor manually controlled one of the objects) as they faced different demands for stance (stable vs. difficult) and control (which actor controlled the larger or smaller object). Our results indicate that when actors were in identical stances, neither led the inter-personal (between actors) coordination by any systematic fashion. Alternatively, when asymmetries in postural demands were introduced, the actor with the more difficult stance led the coordination (as determined using cross-recurrence quantification analysis). Moreover, changes in individual stance difficulty resulted in similar changes in the structure of both intra-personal (individual) and inter-personal (dyadic) coordination, suggesting a scale invariance of the task dynamics. Implications for the study of interpersonal coordination are discussed

Coordination and Collective Performance : Cooperative Goals Boost Interpersonal Synchrony and Task Outcomes

Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Cathy Macpherson and Hope Fawcett-Lipscombe with data collection and coding as well as Mike Richardson for generously sharing Matlab code and providing invaluable guidance. Supplementary Material The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01462Peer reviewedPublisher PD