Sensorimotor learning

This chapter offers a critical review of the scientific research on choking effect. Elaborating on Baumeister’s model, the chapter describes various levels and forms of self-consciousness (perceptual, emotional, motivational, psychological), and explores how they causally link to the disruption of sensorimotor skills in expert athletes. We propose to construe choking from the theoretical perspective of embodied cognition theory, as this approach can effectively account for all the particular ways in which self-consciousness influences how the performer perceives and handles pressure.
The first part of the chapter reviews the experiments and the models suggesting that choking is engendered by perceptual and motoric self-consciousness (i.e., the condition in which the athlete over-scrutinizes certain aspects of her/his own actions, explicitly controlling her/his movement in the attempt to improve the performance output). The second part explores a different aspect of self-consciousness, linked to how the psychological, motivational, and emotional backdrop of the athlete’s experience under pressure influences self-presentation and self-esteem – an influence that can negatively affect performance through the mediation of disruptive personal narratives and social constructions of identity.

Sport psychologists are inclined to embrace Embodied Cognition (EC) because it appreciates how a full range of human experience that includes the affective, perceptual, and motoric, not just the intellectual, constitutes legitimate cognitive activity. EC stresses that sensorimotor skills and bodily affects (denoting moods, emotions and feelings) enable and scaffold cognitive faculties like perception, attention, control, communication, and memory, shaping and orienting the development of more intellectual capacities that involve language processing and rational judgment. Given the pervasive intertwining among psychophysical phenomena in sport performances, it is peremptory to find philosophical accounts of the mind-body relation that are both non-dualistic and anti-reductionist. EC is strongly positioned to provide this. One reason is that it can meaningfully maintain a fundamental distinction between two forms of intelligence, representational and non-representational, while shedding light on how the former emerge from the latter. The representational ones are intellectual, reflective, often linguistically mediated, and abstract, e.g., a sportsperson or coach explicitly focus on and analyze specific movements of the performance; the more basic non-representational ones pertain to bodily engagements that are pre-reflective, i.e., tacit, non-objectifying and non-observational such that they perform unawares as it were. This chapter aims at illustrating how such understanding is needed to give a firm theoretical foundation to the efforts sports psychologists make to model sport performance and skillful expertise in athletes.

Developmental disorders such as autism have generally been theorized as due to some kind of modular “deficit” or “dysfunction”—typically of cortical origin, i.e., failures of “theory of mind”, of the “mirror neuron system”, of “weak central coherence” or of the balance of “empathizing” and “systemizing”, just to list a few. The broad array of autonomic and sensorimotor differences experienced and reported by people with autism have by such theories typically been sidelined as “co-morbidities,” possibly sharing genetic causes, but rendered as incidental and decisively behaviorally irrelevant symptoms—surely disconnected from cognition.
This article entertains the idea that the development of cortically based mental processes and autonomous control relies on the complexities and proper function of the peripheral nervous systems. Through such an “embodied” lens the heterogeneous symptoms of autism invites new interpretations. We propose here that many behavioral-level findings can be re-defined as downstream effects of how developing nervous systems attempt to cope and adapt to the challenges of having various noisy, unpredictable, and unreliable peripheral inputs.

The current rise of neurodevelopmental disorders poses a critical need to detect risk early in order to rapidly intervene. One of the tools pediatricians use to track development is the standard growth chart. The growth charts are somewhat limited in predicting possible neurodevelopmental issues. They rely on linear models and assumptions of normality for physical growth data – obscuring key statistical information about possible neurodevelopmental risk in growth data that actually has accelerated, non-linear rates-of-change and variability encompassing skewed distributions. Here, we use new analytics to profile growth data from 36 newborn babies that were tracked longitudinally for 5 months. By switching to incremental (velocity-based) growth charts and combining these dynamic changes with underlying fluctuations in motor performance – as the transition from spontaneous random noise to a systematic signal – we demonstrate a method to detect very early stunting in the development of voluntary neuromotor control and to flag risk of neurodevelopmental derail.

Autism has been defined as a disorder of social cognition, interaction and communication where ritualistic, repetitive behaviors are commonly observed. But how should we understand the behavioral and cognitive differences that have been the main focus of so much autism research? Can high-level cognitive processes and behaviors be identified as the core issues people with autism face, or do these characteristics perhaps often rather reflect individual attempts to cope with underlying physiological issues?  Much research presented in this volume will point to the latter possibility, i.e. that people on the autism spectrum cope with issues at much lower physiological levels pertaining not only to Central Nervous Systems (CNS) function, but also to peripheral and autonomic systems (PNS, ANS) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013).  The question that we pursue in this chapter is what might be fruitful ways of gaining objective measures of the large-scale systemic and heterogeneous effects of early atypical neurodevelopment; how to track their evolution over time and how to identify critical changes along the continuum of human development and aging. 

We suggest that the study of movement variability—very broadly conceived as including all minute fluctuations in bodily rhythms and their rates of change over time (coined micro-movements (Figure 1A-B) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013))—offers a uniquely valuable and entirely objectively quantifiable lens to better assess, understand and track not only autism but cognitive development and degeneration in general. This chapter presents the rationale firstly behind this focus on micro-movements and secondly behind the choice of specific kinds of data collection and statistical metrics as tools of analysis (Figure 1C).
In brief the proposal is that the micro-movements (defined in Part I – Chapter 1), obtained using various time scales applied to different physiological data-types (some examples in Figure 1), contain information about layered influences and temporal adaptations, transformations and integrations across anatomically semi-independent subsystems that crosstalk and interact. Further, the notion of sensorimotor re-afference is used to highlight the fact that these layered micro-motions are sensed and that this sensory feedback plays a crucial role in the generation and control of movements in the first place. In other words, the measurements of various motoric and rhythmic variations provide an access point not only to the “motor systems”, but also access to much broader central and peripheral sensorimotor and regulatory systems. Lastly, we posit that this new lens can also be used to capture influences from systems of multiple entry points or collaborative control and regulation, such as those that emerge during dyadic social interactions.

Embodied Cognition has been proposed as a relevant theory for tangible and embedded interaction [14]. Based on two 2-year lasting Research-through-Design cases we identify three variations of the theory: 1) Distributed Representation and Computation, 2) Socially Situated Practices and 3) Sensorimotor Coupling & Enactment. Both social situatedness and sensorimotor coupling proved relevant for design and for understanding user behavior in context. We show how the ‘social’ and the ‘sensorimotor’ are part of one integrated sensemaking process we call ‘socio- sensorimotor coupling’. We argue that the, intuitively appealing, idea of using tangibles for external representation actually hinders designing for sensemaking as socio-sensorimotor coupling. We present a vision of Embodied Cognition Design, which goes beyond a representational interpretation, aiming to intervene more directly into the socio-sensorimotor loop.

— A low-cost middle size humanoid biped robot built using 3D printing techniques and equipped with a neuromor-phic control system is presented. The mechanical structure is made of polylactide (PLA), Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) and aluminum. This allows to keep the overall weight under 3 Kg and still reach a sufficient structural rigidity. The joints are actuated by brush-less DC motors with integrated electronics and gearbox capable to generate up to 8Nm. Angular positions are measured by potentiometers and contact-less magnetic encoders. The control architecture consists of different modules capable to learn and autonomously reproduce complex periodic trajectories. Each module is represented by a recurrent neural network with a core of dynamic neurons randomly and sparsely connected with fixed synapses. A set of read-out units with adaptable connection realize a linear combination of the neurons output in order to reproduce the target signals.

Since its infancy embodied cognition research has fundamentally changed our understanding of how action, perception, and cognition relate to and interact with each other. Ideas from different schools of thought have led to controversial theories and a unifying framework is still being debated. In this perspective paper, we argue that in order to improve our understanding of embodied cognition and to take significant steps toward a comprehensive framework, a lifespan approach is mandatory. Given that most established theories have been developed and tested in the adult population, which is characterized by relatively robust and stable sensorimotor and cognitive abilities, we deem it questionable whether embodied cognition effects found in this population are representative for different life stages such as childhood or the elderly. In contrast to adulthood, childhood is accompanied by a rapid increase of sensorimotor and cognitive skills, and the old age by a decline of such capacities. Hence, sensorimotor and cognitive capacities, as well as their interactions, are more fragile at both extremes of the lifespan, thereby offering a unique window into the emergence of embodied cognition effects and age-related differences therein. A lifespan approach promises to make a major contribution toward a unifying and comprehensive theory of embodied cognition that is valid across the lifespan and 'gets better with age.'