ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on skill as goal-directed intentional behaviour. To date, mainstream accounts of goal-directed human movement have privileged particular explanations and ways of thinking about coordinated human movement. This is because the dominant approach has been to favour internal processing models and accept the belief that movement coordination is by homunculus control. Homunculus control of human movement implies ‘a little person inside the head’ who centrally controls and organizes human actions. In recent times there has been a growing number of challenges to internal hierarchical control models, schema theory and motor representations. Such critiques have been augmented by concerns that there is a lack of recognition given to the performance context. An alternative way of understanding skilful human movement is provided by the work done in coordination dynamics (Kelso & Engstrom, 2006) and ecological psychology (Gibson, 1966, 1979), both of whom argue that intentional human movement involves complex, self-organizing, system integration rather than homunculus control. The basic tenets of this more holistic approach suggest that skill is an emergent behaviour that is dependent on the nonlinear, self-organizing but intentional actions of the performer(s) within discursively rich movement contexts (Davids, Button, & Bennett, 2008). However, many ecological explanations of human movement are confined to the perceptual–action couplings at the individual–environment level without reference to the internal dynamics involved in cognition. In so doing, ecological psychology has been criticized for not offering a plausible account of the role of cognition in goal-directed behaviour (see, for example, Abernathy, 2009; Beek, 2009; Nitsch, 2009). This chapter raises the concern that accounts of human movement should include consideration of conscious goal-seeking behaviours.
