Integration of professional judgement and decision-making in high-level adventure sports coaching practice

This study examined the integration of professional judgement and decision-making processes in adventure sports coaching. The study utilised a thematic analysis approach to investigate the decision-making practices of a sample of high-level adventure sports coaches over a series of sessions. Results revealed that, in order to make judgements and decisions in practice, expert coaches employ a range of practical and pedagogic management strategies to create and opportunistically use time for decision-making. These approaches include span of control and time management strategies to facilitate the decision-making process regarding risk management, venue selection, aims, objectives, session content, and differentiation of the coaching process. The implication for coaches, coach education, and accreditation is the recognition and training of the approaches that“create time” for the judgements in practice, namely“creating space to think”. The paper concludes by offering a template for a more expertise-focused progression in adventure sports coachin

Professional judgement and decision-making in the planning process of high-level adventure sports coaching practice

This investigation examined the planning and decision-making processes in adventure sports coaching. We utilised a thematic analysis approach to investigate the planning decision-making practices of a sample of high-level adventure sports coaches over a series of sessions. The investigation discovered that, in planning coaching activity, high-level adventure sports coaches draw on their epistemological values and domain-specific expertise, employ a synergy of classic and naturalistic decision-making processes, and continually audit the evolving coaching process. Based on these findings, implications for professional training, accreditation and development of adventure sports coaches are presented

Conscious and Unconscious Reward Cues Can Affect a Critical Component of Executive Control: (Un)conscious updating?

The present study investigates whether updating an important function of executive control can be driven by unconscious reward cues. Participants had to memorize several numbers and update those numbers independently according to a sequence of arithmetic operations. At the beginning of each trial, a reward (1 euro or 5 cents) was presented, either subliminally or supraliminally. Participants could earn the reward if they found the correct response on the updating task. Results showed better performance when a high (conscious or unconscious) reward was at stake compared to a low reward. This suggests that subliminal information can influence a component process of executive control traditionally thought to require consciousness

Unconscious associative learning with conscious cues

Despite extensive research, the very existence of unconscious learning in humans remains much debated. Skepticism arises chiefly from the difficulty in assessing the level of awareness of the complex associations learned in classical implicit learning paradigms. Here, we show that simple associations between colors and motion directions can be learned unconsciously. In each trial, participants had to report the motion direction of a patch of colored dots but unbeknownst to the participants, two out of the three possible colors were always associated with a given direction/response, while one was uninformative. We confirm the lack of awareness by using several tasks, fulfilling the most stringent criteria. In addition, we show the crucial role of trial-by-trial feedback, and that both the stimulus-response (motor) and stimulus-stimulus (perceptual) associations were learned. In conclusion, we demonstrate that simple associations between supraliminal stimulus features can be learned unconsciously, providing a novel framework to study unconscious learning.status: publishe

Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentatio

When Affect Supports Cognitive Control – A Working Memory Perspective

The paper delineates a study of executive functions (EFs), construed as procedural working memory (WM), from a motivational perspective. Since WM theories and motivation theories are both concerned with purposive activity, the role of implicit evaluations (affects) observed in goal pursuit can be anticipated to arise also in the context of cognitive control, e.g., during the performance of the Stroop task. The role of positive and negative affect in goal pursuit consists in controlling attention resources according to the goal and situational requirements. Positive affect serves to maintain goals and means in the scope of attention (EF1), whereas negative affect activates the inhibition of non-functional contents, e.g., distractors and irrelevant objects (resulting in attention disengagement; EF2). Adaptation to conflict proceeds via sequential triggering of negative and positive affect (EF3). Moreover, it was demonstrated that the focus on action or reflection changes the scope of contents subjected to implicit (affective) control. Therefore, I suggest that the motivational system, to a large extent, plays the role of the Central Executive. The paper opens a discussion and proposes studies on affective mechanisms of cognitive control