On the Relatedness and Nestedness of Constraints

Abstract

The purpose of this opinion paper is providing a platform for explaining and discussing the relatedness and nestedness of constraints on the basis of four claims: (a) task constraints are distributed between the person and the environment and hence are relational variables, (b) being relational, task constraints are also emergent properties of the organism/environment system, (c) constraints are nested in timescales, and (d) a vast set of constraints are correlated through circular causality. Theoretical implications for improving the understanding of the constraints-led approach and practical applications for enhancing the manipulation of constraints in learning and training settings are proposed.

Sport Practitioners as Sport Ecology Designers: How Ecological Dynamics Has Progressively Changed Perceptions of Skill “Acquisition” in the Sporting Habitat

“…From an ecological perspective, the "environment" refers to an animal's surroundings within which it can perceive and act, changing the environment and their deeply entwined relationship with it (Gibson, 1979). These relationships can be changed across different timescales (in sport, evolving along the macro-scale of talent development and changing within the micro-structure of practice; see Davids et al, 2017;Balagué et al, 2019). Thus, actions and behaviors should be understood as the result of specialized relationships that emerge between an organism and its environment (Handford et al, 1997).…”

Wayfinding: How Ecological Perspectives of Navigating Dynamic Environments Can Enrich Our Understanding of the Learner and the Learning Process in Sport

“…This observation indicates that affordances may solicit individuals to act upon them at different time points. Designing practice tasks which solicit individuals to seek and utilise affordances is a major challenge for sport practitioners, ensuring a functional match with a developing learner’s action capabilities (effectivities) [ 32 ]. This design challenge implicates the integration of performance analytics and skill adaptation in sport to ensure a tight fit between the developmental status of a learner and the specific constraints of a learning environment [ 8 ].…”

Theory of Cooperative-Competitive Intelligence: Principles, Research Directions, and Applications

“…This does not mean that the coordination at this level is independent. On the contrary, it is constrained from below and from above ( Balagué et al, 2019 ). Hence, a larger performance in any or all of these abilities means a larger D/U potential of coordinative patterns and, hence, can be measured as entropy variables ( Hristovski, 1989 ; see Figure 4 ).…”

“…However, instead of the usual practice of providing each agent with a set of specific rules for each dimension, and scenario-dependent rules of behavior, initially agents can be constrained in fewer dimensions by the principles depicted above. For example, the motivation climate (e.g., Duda and Appleton, 2016 ) as a slowly changing variable ( Balagué et al, 2019 ) may be applied to an individual agent-environment ( Withagen, 2018 ) and/or at the team level as the entropy parameter. The cascade effects toward quicker processes may then be simulated down to performance level.…”

“…These different timescales, however, cannot be compared with respect to CCI. On the other hand, they are nested and are probably subject to circular causality ( Balagué et al, 2019 ).…”