Mind in action: the interplay of cognition and action in skilled performance

Introduction

Skilled sport performance is the result of a complex interaction of motor and cognitive skills in dynamic environments. While cognitive and motor processes in peak performance have often been examined independently in established research programmes, this separation is falling out of favour. In newer approaches, the body is considered as a central informant for cognitive processes (e.g. Goldman & de Vignemont, 2009; Raab, 2017), especially when it holds valid information due to extensive motor experience. Understanding how humans make use of their cognitive and bodily resources to accomplish motor tasks in ecological settings can help to identify the complex mechanisms underpinning skilled performance and to develop interventions that improve performance in sports and other high-performance domains.

The aim of this special issue was to combine and integrate emerging research on the “mind in action” by scientists from cognitive psychology, movement science, ecology psychology, and perception. In particular, we aimed to deepen our theoretical understanding of sports performance by investigating the bidirectional relations of cognition and action and cognitive-motor interactions in ecological settings.

In this editorial of the special issue, we (1) specify the added value of considering the body as an informant of cognitive processes in sport psychology research which motivated this special issue, (2) provide an overview of the articles published in this special issue (n = 11, see Figure 1), and (3) based on the main foci and research gaps in this special issue, point out future directions for the field.

Figure 1. Overview of accepted articles structured according to bodily experiences and task experience.

Mind in action: the body as informant of cognitive processes

We posit that an understanding of the complex mechanisms underpinning skilled performance in sports and other high-performance domains requires to consider action in the equation. Action comes with a variety of bodily experiences that may influence and interact with cognition. We suggest to position these bodily experiences resulting from actions along a sensory-motor continuum. Sensory information is the input from multiple sensory modalities, which include the five classic senses of vision, audition, tactile stimulation, olfaction, and gustation. Motor information stems from the set of central and peripheral structures in the nervous system that support movements, such as muscles and neural connections with muscle tissues. Sensorimotor information integrates information from both the sensory and motor system. Importantly, these experiences can be “online” experiences resulting from current actions or they can be “offline” resulting from previously learned or executed movements (Schütz-Bosbach & Prinz, 2007). For instance, referees were found to rely on their own motor experience when making judgments about athletes’ movements (Pizzera, 2015). Offline effects may be particularly pronounced in skilled performance, which is often characterised by expertise or task experience in relation to age (Swann et al., 2015). In the present special issue, the included studies did not empirically test different age groups. Task experience was reported across all studies and thus, a second dimension quantifies the experience performers have with a specific task (see Figure 1).

Considering the body as an informant of cognitive processes requires a theoretical shift. Bidirectional links and interactions between cognition and action are at odds with the classic understanding of perception, cognition, and action as a serial process. In these models, action is the output of the process that only begins after cognitive processes have been completed. Thus, novel theories and models are required which acknowledge the fact that perception, cognition, and action are deeply intertwined, deploy in parallel, and influence each other bidirectionally. Such theories and models have been suggested in the field of embodied cognition and have started to influence work in sport psychology in the last recent years (Cappuccio, 2019; Raab, 2017; Voigt et al., 2023). However, an in-depth understanding of the underlying mechanisms has not yet been developed and the existing models are still in their infancy regarding the specification and quantification of the effects of bodily experiences on cognition in relation to individual and situational factors.

Employing an embodied perspective on sports performance also warrants a shift in research approaches and methods. The classic serial view may have shaped methodological approaches that hinder the exploration of the intertwined nature of cognition and action in sports (cf. Lejarraga & Hertwig, 2021). The experimental tasks should exert similar demands on both the motor and the cognitive system and the measures implemented should be able to capture (the interaction of) cognitive and motor processes “online” to integrate a feedback loop from action to cognition (Musculus et al., 2021; Voigt et al., 2023). We believe that the effects of bodily experiences on cognition can be specified and quantified by varying or manipulating the body and environment where these processes occur (see Table 1; cf. Raab et al., 2023). These methods will be fuelled by recent technological and computational advancements that now allow to examine skilled performance in full and challenging ecological settings, both at a time and dynamically over time.

Table 1. List of accepted articles in the special issue.

	No. of article	Authors	Title	Methodological approaches	Sports/ domain	Cognitive processes	Variation
Sensory	1	Schillert & Bläsing (2024)	Dancing without seeing – the influence of vision on movement learning and motor imagery in dance	Intervention	Dancing	Learning, memory recall	Environment
	2	Müller et al. (2024)	Multisensory integration in anticipation: Moderating effects of time and task constraints	Experiment	Tennis	Anticipation	Environment
Sensorimotor	3	Camponogara et al. (2024)	Volleyball serves impact sound intensity and frequency cues affect the predictions of the future ball’s landing point according to the level of auditory-motor expertise	Skilled-novices comparison	Volleyball	Anticipation	Body + environment
	4	Colm et al. (2024)	The effect of domain-specific exercise on high- and low-level cognitive processing during anticipation	Experiment	Cricket	Anticipation	Body
	5	Hodges et al. (2024)	Assessing the validity and reliability of a baseball pitch discrimination online task	Method validation	Baseball	Anticipation	Body
	6	Jost et al. (2024)	Effect of a concurrent maximum performance aerobic exercise test and cognitive task on physical and cognitive performance and effort	Experiment	Aerobic exercise	Mental rotation	Body
	7	Madinabeitia et al. (2024)	Sport as cognition enhancer from childhood to young adulthood: a systematic review focused on sport modality	Systematic review	Sports interventions	Various	Body + environment
	8	Ruggeri et al. (2024)	Selective advantage of climbers in spatial navigation tasks	Skilled-novices comparison	Climbing	Planning	Body
	9	Sidhu et al. (2024)	Mild traumatic brain injury and the propensity for movement specific reinvestment	Correlational	Injury	Reinvestment	Body
Motor	10	Orth et al. (2024)	Skill shapes functional movement variability and exploration tendencies: The effect of skill under variable environmental constraints on the emergence of creative action in a divergent kickboxing task	Skilled-novices comparison	Kickboxing	Creativity	Body + environment
	11	Raffan et al. (2024)	You can’t con a conman: the perception of deceptive actions performed by the self and others	Experiment	Rugby	Anticipation	Body

These theoretical and methodological advances will spill over to the applied field in sports and other high-performance domains (e.g., aviation, police, medical emergency). Studying well-trained humans accomplishing their skills will allow to recognise the kinds of motor-cognitive processes needed for peak performance but aims to generalise these observations to any actions in dynamic and complex environments and to draw conclusion for the development of methods for enhancing performance across domains. As sport psychology naturally deals with skilled cognitive-motor performance in various dynamic environments, it constitutes a good testbed that provides rich opportunities for an experimentally oriented research strategy (e.g., Gordon et al., 2021). Thus, although future research may be intrinsically motivated by questions, challenges, and problems within the field of sports, we still believe that sport psychology should also assign itself the task of contributing to the basic understanding of cognitive-motor processes in human actions.

Overview of included studies

This special issue is a collection of empirical research on the interaction of cognition and action in skilled performance, which was motivated by the emerging trend of embodied cognition in sport psychology (Cappuccio, 2019; Raab, 2017; Voigt et al., 2023). From the 19 articles received, we have accepted 11 high-quality articles from authors working in Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, UK, and USA. They cover a variety of cognitive processes related to skilled performance and thus, the respective theoretical and methodological approaches differ greatly between the articles. Given the present focus on motor-cognitive interaction in skilled performance, we have ordered the papers by the two dimensions sensory-motor continuum and task experience (see Figure 1).

The articles captured multiple cognitive processes across different sports (see Table 1), with anticipation most frequently examined in five studies (Camponogara, Murgia, Orso, & Sors, 2024; Colm, Hinde, Roca, Williams, & North, 2024; Hodges, Grieve, Besser, Müller, & Spering, 2024; Müller, Will, & Bruland, 2024; Raffan, Mann, & Savelsbergh, 2024). Most of the studies (n = 7) tested domain-specific cognitive processes using sport-specific task stimuli rather than domain-general cognition functions and skills, which is in line with the meta-analytic result that using sport-specific tests are better able to differentiate between higher- and lower-skilled athletes (Kalén et al., 2021). Notably, of the studies using domain-general cognitive tests, sport-specific experience was not at interest, but rather they tested the influence of acute or chronic sport participation and exercise in general (Madinabeitia et al., 2024) and action-related cognitive processes, such as mental rotation (Jost, Luttmann, & Jansen, 2024), spatial navigation (Ruggeri, Stanciu, & Völter, 2024), and reinvestment (Sidhu, Uiga, Langley, Draper, & Masters, 2024). These findings add to a recent and controversial debate about the benefits of sports participation on domain-general cognitive functions (Furley et al., 2023; Kalén et al., 2021).

The vast majority of the studies (n = 7) investigated the influence of sensorimotor experiences on cognitive processes (see Figure 1), which illustrates the methodological challenge of dissociating sensory and motor experience in cross-sectional studies, as they are often confounded in experts (e.g., Camponogara et al., 2024, Hodges et al., 2024, Ruggeri et al., 2024). Other studies investigated the influence of sensorimotor experiences by manipulating physiological load (Colm et al., 2024, Jost et al., 2024), acute and chronic sport participation (Madinabeitia et al., 2024), and mild traumatic brain injury (Sidhu et al., 2024). Only two studies focused on the influence of sensory and motor experiences, respectively. While Schillert & Bläsing (2024) completely blocked out visual information during dance sequence learning to investigate the role of vision, Müller et al. (2024) manipulated temporal constraints in the task to investigate how auditory information contributes to the anticipation of tennis ball’s trajectories. For motor experiences, Orth, van der Kamp, Memmert, and Savelsbergh (2024) used a kickboxing task in which motor experience, but not visual experience with the punching bag should impact participants’ actions. Raffan et al. (2024) used a self vs. other paradigm to dissociate visual and motor experience. Rugby players with the same skill level arguably had the same visual experience, but either anticipated the deceptive actions of others or themselves in videos, thus varying in their motor experience with the observed actions. These examples showcase how varying the environment or the body can help to differentiate the bodily experiences arising from actions and their interplay with cognition in skilled performance.

Future directions

From the analysis of the included studies above, one main future research endeavour becomes apparent: future research should try to experimentally dissociate sensory and motor experiences, as this will allow us to move beyond “the effect of” and specify and quantify the mechanisms underlying the interplay of cognition and action in skilled performance. Similarly, future research should also distinguish expertise and experience in relation to age. In contrast to adulthood that was addressed by all studies in this special issue, childhood and the old age are accompanied by rapid changes in cognitive and motor skill and thus, may provide a unique window into the emergence of the interplay of cognition and action (Loffler et al., 2016; Musculus et al., 2021). Such research requires theory-based testable hypotheses under which individual and situational constraints specific principles provide a parsimonious explanation of skilled performance. In this special issue, multiple theoretical approaches were used to test the influence of bodily experiences on the same cognitive process, e.g., for anticipation authors based their research on the attentional control theory (Colm et al., 2024), multisensory integration account (Müller et al., 2024), or common-coding theory (Raffan et al., 2024). Therefore, we suggest that future research should test theories in comparisons, integrate theories (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2017), or build new theories to explain and predict the interplay of cognition and action in skilled performance.

On a methodological level, future research should include continuous measures of motor processes in naturalistic actions (Hoffmann et al., 2018) to be able to capture the interaction of cognition and action beyond the bidirectional links. In the present special issue, only one study required motor responses that reflected the demands of this specific sport and analysed related kinematic data (Orth et al., 2024). This is surprising as the influence of bodily experiences on cognition is assumed to be stronger in tasks require naturalistic actions, which incorporate complexity (i.e., sequential or continuous movements), uncertainty (i.e., in the sensorimotor system), and task experience (i.e., different experience and expertise levels). Principles that hold for simple movements may do not necessarily generalise to complex moments (Wulf & Shea, 2002). Thus, multi-experiment research programmes need to be conducted that integrate naturalistic actions and respective measures, but without losing methodological rigour (Maselli et al., 2023; Raab et al., 2023).

In sum, we wish that the reader acquires exciting and new knowledge on the interplay of cognition and action in skilled performance and that the future directions followed up on by systematic research programmes will provide important directions for the field of sport psychology. In particular, we envision that future research in sport psychology will describe, explain, predict, and improve performance by considering the body as a resource for cognition, rather than an output of cognition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).