Virtue ethicists often appeal to practical skill as a way of understanding the nature of virtue. An important commitment of a skill account of virtue is that virtue is learned through practice and not through study, memorization, or reflection alone. In what follows, I will argue that virtue ethicists have only given us half the story. In particular, in focusing on outputs, or on the right actions or responses to moral situations, virtue ethicists have overlooked a crucial facet (...) of virtue: namely, that through practice, virtuous agents develop a cache of perceptual skills that allow them to attend to, detect, and identify the relevant features of a perceptual array, the selection of which is central to recognizing and categorizing a situation as a moral situation of a particular type. In order to support this claim, I will appeal to empirical studies of motor expertise, which show that an expert's capacity to attend to and recognize relevant perceptual inputs differs in important respects from the layperson's. Specifically, I will argue that performing the right action in the right circumstances improves an agent's ability to attend to and identify the morally relevant features of a moral situation. (shrink)

We sought to gain more insight into the effects of attention focus and time constraints on skill learning and performance in novices and experts by means of two complementary experiments using a table tennis paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that skill-focus conditions and slowed ball frequency disrupted the accuracy of experts, but dual-task conditions and speeded ball frequency did not. For novices, only speeded ball frequency disrupted accuracy. In Experiment 2, we extended these findings by instructing novices either explicitly (...) or by analogy . Explicitly instructed novices were less accurate in skill-focused and dual-task conditions than in single-task conditions. Following analogy instruction novices were less accurate in the skill-focused condition, but maintained accuracy under dual-task conditions. Participants in both conditions retained accuracy when ball frequency was slowed, but lost accuracy when ball frequency was speeded, suggesting that not attention, but motor dexterity, was inadequate under high temporal constraints. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is often interpreted as claiming that opportunities for action are directly present in perceptual experience. However, he does not provide much evidence for how or why this would occur, and one can doubt that this is an appropriate interpretation of his phenomenological descriptions. In particular, it could be argued the Merleau-Pontyian descriptions mistakenly attribute pre-perceptual or post-perceptual elements such as allocation of attention or judgment to the perceptual experience itself. This paper argues for the (...) Merleau-Pontyian idea that opportunities for action are present in perceptual experience. It further argues that the phenomenological descriptions can be supported and explained via reference to contemporary research on motor imagery. In particular, it will be argued that non-conscious, covert motor imagery is used to prepare for and regulate skilled actions, and that it is plausible that this imagery combines with perception (likely vision) to create a single experience of the environment as enabling action. The paper will also show that contemporary views on motor imagery are broadly compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s aims. (shrink)

Developmental coordination disorder is a heterogeneous condition. Besides motor impairments, children with DCD often exhibit poor visual perceptual skills and executive functions. This study aimed to characterize the motor, perceptual, and cognitive profiles of children with DCD at the group level and in terms of subtypes. A total of 50 children with DCD and 31 typically developing peers underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological and motor assessment. The percentage of children with DCD showing impairments in each measurement (...) was first described. Hierarchical agglomerative and K-means iterative partitioning clustering analyses were then performed to distinguish the subtypes present among the complete sample of children in a data-driven way. Moderate to large percentages of children with DCD showed impaired executive functions and praxis, as well as attentional, visual perceptual, and visuomotor skills. Clustering analyses identified five subtypes, four of them mainly consisting of children with DCD and one of TD children. These subtypes were characterized by: generalized impairments, impaired manual dexterity, poor balance, planning, and alertness, impaired manual dexterity, cognitive inhibition, and poor visual perception, impaired manual dexterity and cognitive inhibition, and no impairment. Besides subtle differences, the motor and praxis measures did not enable to discriminate between the four subtypes of children with DCD. The subtypes were, however, characterized by distinct perceptual or cognitive impairments. These results highlight the importance of assessing exhaustively the perceptual and cognitive skills of children with DCD. (shrink)

People are remarkably smart: They use language, possess complex motor skills, make nontrivial inferences, develop and use scientific theories, make laws, and adapt to complex dynamic environments. Much of this knowledge requires concepts and this study focuses on how people acquire concepts. It is argued that conceptual development progresses from simple perceptual grouping to highly abstract scientific concepts. This proposal of conceptual development has four parts. First, it is argued that categories in the world have different structure. Second, (...) there might be different learning systems that evolved to learn categories of differing structures. Third, these systems exhibit differential maturational course, which affects how categories of different structures are learned in the course of development. And finally, an interaction of these components may result in the developmental transition from perceptual groupings to more abstract concepts. This study reviews a large body of empirical evidence supporting this proposal. (shrink)

We conducted a narrative review of existing literature to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for officers who police in democratic societies to successfully manage potentially volatile police–public interactions. This review revealed 10 such KSAs that are frequently discussed in the literature. These KSAs include: knowledge of policies and laws; an understanding of mental health-related issues; an ability to interact effectively with, and show respect for, individuals from diverse community groups; awareness and management of stress effects; communication skills; decision-making (...) and problem-solving skills; perceptual skills; motor skills related to use-of-force; emotion and behavior regulation; and an ability to treat people in a procedurally just manner. Following our review, we conducted semi-structured interviews with researchers who specialize in police training and adult education, interactions with individuals in crisis, and racialized policing, as well as two police trainers with expertise in de-escalation and use-of-force training. These interviews confirmed the importance of the 10 KSAs and highlighted two additional KSAs that are likely to be critical: understanding the role of policing in a free and democratic society and tactical knowledge and skills. To ensure that police–public interactions are managed effectively, police trainers may want to focus on the development and evaluation of these KSAs—something that is not always done currently. (shrink)

The first few years of driving is a critical period when driving skills develop and the driving style is established. While the actual driving skills improve during the first few years of driving, a novice driver’s view of himself/herself as a safe and/or skilful driver also develops rapidly. The aim of this study was to investigate self-evaluated driver safety and perceptual-motor skills among different age groups of young drivers, along with the relationships between self-evaluated skills and driving behaviour. (...) The sample consisted of a stratified random sample of 18–25-year-old drivers from the Finnish driving licence register. The questionnaires, which included the Driver Skill Inventory, Driver Behaviour Questionnaire and background information, were completed and returned by a total of 1,058 participants. While female drivers assessed their safety skills to be higher than their perceptual-motor skills, the opposite was true for males. In both sexes, perceptual-motor skills increased, and safety skills decreased with experience. Perceptual-motor skills correlated negatively with safety skills, lapses and errors, but positively with aggressive and ordinary violations. Safety skills correlated negatively with all DBQ variables. Safety orientation seems to be most clearly reflected in deliberate aberrant driving behaviours. Sex differences were observed in the development of behaviours and skills, perceptual-motor skills only increased with age among males, while safety skills decreased through experience among both men and women. Results showed that driving experience was strongly related to both driving style and the drivers’ view of their skills, highlighting the importance of the first few years of driving. (shrink)

In this article, I link the empirical hypothesis that neural representations of sensory stimulation near the body involve a unique motor component to the idea that the perceptual field is structured by skillful bodily activity. The neurophenomenological view that emerges is illuminating in its own right, though it may also have practical consequences. I argue that recent experiments attempting to alter the scope of these near space sensorimotor representations are actually equivocal in what they show. I propose resolving (...) this ambiguity by treating these representations as responsive to the development or degeneration of know-how—which can be isolated as an appropriate object for scientific investigation. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate (...) and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action. (shrink)

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 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 modularised 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, may 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 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 modularised 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, emphasising 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. (shrink)

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. (...) Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them. (shrink)

Wynn shows that intentionally standardized artifacts (handaxes) provide evidence of the ability to conceptualize form (symmetry). However, such conceptual ability is not sufficient for the actual production of these forms. Stone knapping is a concrete skill that is acquired in the real world. Appreciation of its perceptual-motor foundations and the broader issues surrounding skill acquisition may lead to further important insights into human cognitive evolution.

I draw on empirical results from perceptual and motor learning to argue for an anti-intellectualist position on skill. Anti-intellectualists claim that skill or know-how is non-propositional. Recent proponents of the view have stressed the flexible but fine-grained nature of skilled control as supporting their position. However, they have left the nature of the mental representations underlying such control undertheorized. This leaves open several possible strategies for the intellectualist, particularly with regard to skill learning. Propositional knowledge (...) may structure the inputs to sensorimotor learning, may constitute the outcomes of said learning, or may be needed for the employment of learned skill. I argue that sensorimotor learning produces multi-scale associational representations, and that these representations are of the right sort to underlie flexible and fine-grained control. I then suggest that their content is vitally indeterminate with regard to propositional content attribution, because they exhibit a kind of open-ended structure. I articulate this kind of structure, and use it to respond to the three intellectualist strategies. I then show how the perspective I advance offers insights for understanding both instruction and expert practice. (shrink)

Intelligible speakers achieve specific vocal tract constrictions in rapid sequence. These constrictions are associated in theory with speech motor goals. Adult-focused models of speech production assume that discrete phonological representations, sequenced into word-length plans for output, define these goals. This assumption introduces a serial order problem for speech. It is also at odds with children's speech. In particular, child phonology and timing control suggest holistic speech plans, and so the hypothesis of whole word production. This hypothesis solves the serial (...) order problem by avoiding it. When the same solution is applied to adult speech the problem becomes how to explain the development of highly intelligible speech. This is the problem addressed here. A modeling approach is used to demonstrate how perceptual-motor units of production emerge over developmental time with the perceptual-motor integration of holistic speech plans that are also phonological representations; the specific argument is that perceptual-motor units are a product of trajectories (nearly) crossing in motor space. The model, which focuses on the integration process, defines the perceptual-motor map as a set of linked pairs of experienced perceptual and motor trajectories. The trajectories are time-based excursions through speaker-defined perceptual and motor spaces. By hypothesis, junctures appear where motor trajectories near or overlap one another in motor space when the shared (or extremely similar) articulatory configurations in these regions are exploited to combine perceptually-linked motor paths along different trajectories. Junctures form in clusters in motor space. These clusters, along with their corresponding (linked) perceptual points, represent perceptual-motor units of production, albeit at the level of speech motor control only. The units serve as pivots in motor space during speaking; they are points of transition from one motor trajectory to another along perceptually-linked paths that are selected to produce best approximations of whole word targets. (shrink)

Artists, art critics, art historians, and cognitive psychologists have asserted that visual artists perceive the world differently than nonartists and that these perceptual abilities are the product of knowledge of techniques for working in an artistic medium. In support of these claims, Kozbelt (2001) found that artists outperform nonartists in visual analysis tasks and that these perceptual advantages are statistically correlated with drawing skill. We propose a model to explain these results that is derived from a diagnostic (...) framework for object recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize and reproduce stimulus features sufficient for adequate artistic production in a medium, and that these schemata become encoded as motor plans as artists develop technical proficiency in a medium. We hypothesize that artists' perceptual advantages can therefore, be explained by the role spatial schemata and motor plans play in selective attention. (shrink)

The proposal that language has evolved to conform to general cognitive and learning constraints inherent in the human brain calls for specification of these mechanisms. We propose that just as cognition appears to be grounded in cross-modal perceptual-motor capabilities, so too must language. Evidence for perceptual-motor grounding comes from non-arbitrary sound-to-meaning correspondences and their role in word learning.

Children’s fine motor skills link to cognitive development, however, research on their involvement in language processing, also with adults, is scarce. Lexical items are processed differently depending on the degree of sensorimotor information inherent in the words’ meanings, such as whether these imply a body-object interaction or a body-part association. Accordingly, three studies examined whether lexical processing was affected by FMS, BOIness, and body-part associations in children and adults. Analyses showed a differential link between FMS and lexical processing as (...) a function of age. Whereas response latencies indicated that children’s FMS were associated with “hand” words, adults’ FMS linked to the broader concept of BOI. Findings have implications for shared activation theories positing that FMS support lexical processing. (shrink)

Electronic sports and other variants of ‘digital sports’ have increased in popularity all over the world and may even come to challenge hegemonic concepts of sport. More relevant than the apparent opposition between ‘physical’ and ‘non-physical’ is the question what kind of embodiment is manifested within virtual environments. In this paper, we argue that eSports do require the learning and performance of motor skills and that embodiment within a virtual environment may be considered playful or even athletic. The type (...) of skills that might be tested can even be considered fundamental movement skills. Under appropriate educational supervision, with knowledge of the game, eSports can be utilized for the development of specific elements of digital literacy. Although motor skills are a defining characteristic of eSports, we do not argue that eSports should be integrated within PE. These arguments have not so much to do with the status of physicality present, but with differences in t... (shrink)

Electronic sports and other variants of ‘digital sports’ have increased in popularity all over the world and may even come to challenge hegemonic concepts of sport. More relevant than the apparent opposition between ‘physical’ and ‘non-physical’ is the question what kind of embodiment is manifested within virtual environments. In this paper, we argue that eSports do require the learning and performance of motor skills and that embodiment within a virtual environment may be considered playful or even athletic. The type (...) of skills that might be tested can even be considered fundamental movement skills. Under appropriate educational supervision, with knowledge of the game, eSports can be utilized for the development of specific elements of digital literacy. Although motor skills are a defining characteristic of eSports, we do not argue that eSports should be integrated within PE. These arguments have not so much to do with the status of physicality present, but with differences in t... (shrink)

Cognitive science has recently moved toward action-integrated paradigms to account for some of its most remarkable findings. This novel approach has opened up new venues for the sport sciences. In particular, a large body of literature has investigated the relationship between complex motor practice and cognition, which in the sports domain has mostly concerned the effect of imagery and other forms of mental practice on motor skill acquisition and emotional control. Yet recent evidence indicates that this relationship (...) is bidirectional: motor experience also influences higher cognition, with a broad range of cognitive abilities being impacted in various ways. In this paper, I review the latest research exploring the effect of complex motor practice on spatial cognition. After emphasizing the versatility of processes that are recruited in the acquisition of complex motor skills, I present further experimental evidence to suggest that the process of acquiring new motor skills triggers specific adaptions in the brain, which in turn can be critical in numerous aspects of daily life. Finally, I propose a mechanistic explanation to account for motor-induced improvements, within an embodied framework of cognition. (shrink)

People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people (...) confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically different conscious beliefs. Where simple solutions to important evolutionary problems exist, unconscious perception needs to be impervious to conscious beliefs. (shrink)

PurposeGross motor skills and inhibitory control which are both development in preschool stage is significant for preschooler to healthy growth. However, the evidence of relationship between them in preschoolers are still insufficient, most of studies only focus on youth. Thus, the aim of this research is to examine the association between GMS and IC in preschool children.MethodsThis cross-sectional study used baseline data from a previous intervention study of preschoolers conducted in 2018. GMS were assessed by using the Test for (...) Gross Motor Development in preschoolers, which includes two subtests of locomotor and object control skills. Total GMS is calculated from the sum of these two subtests. The Fish Flanker task was used to evaluate both accuracy and reaction time of IC. Multivariate linear regression models were established to analyze the relationships between GMS and IC.ResultsA total of 123 preschool-age children were included in the final analysis. After adjusting for confounders, GMS, locomotor, and object control skills were all negatively related with reaction time of IC.ConclusionThere was a significant negative correlation between gross motor skills and the reaction time of inhibitory control in preschool children. Further research is needed to verify this finding in prospective and experimental studies. (shrink)