Bruineberg, J., Seifert, L., Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2021). Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior. Synthese, 199(5), 12819-12842

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Studying behaviour through ‘Metastable Attunement’ allows us to bridge the gap between the influence of past experiences and influences of the present on skillful behaviour
2. “Skilled agents will often act in a metastable zone that allows them to keep their options open by remaining poised over multiple possibilities for action simultaneously. By remaining in a state of metastable attunement they can switch among affordances smoothly when something changes either on the side of the agent or in the environment”
3. We can encourage the players to be in metastable zones through our practice design. By constraints manipulation and through designing a field of ‘promoted actions’

🤝Impressions

This was a brilliant paper and there was so much to takeaway from it. The concept of ‘metastable attunement’ is really interesting

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• I will think more about how past experiences will influence how they are attuning to certain affordances. Think of the past experiences as a scaffold
• Skilled Intentionality allows us to combine both an ‘ecological’ view and first person view to understand how skillful movement occurs. ‘Sensitivity’ to what affordances may offer in the environment can be seen in many
• Metastable Attunement will be a very useful concept when studying movement on how players are interacting with their environment.
• ‘Place Affordances’ are what certain environments offer the person. How do these influence your coaching?
• Players that are skilful are ‘metastably attuned’. They are able to keep lots of options open while searching for the best option based on affordances offered by environment.
• Meta vs Multi what influence do they have? Metastability is involves being able to exploit the abundance of ‘degrees of freedom’
• There are different types of learning that take place. Bifurcation is when there is a new attractor formed or when there is big modifications to an attractor. Think underarm serve vs normal serve. ‘Shift’ is when the attractor landscape and relations between them is slightly modified
• As a coach we can help them to educate their attention through good task design to help them to become attuned to more specifying information in the environment
• The environment has to be at a ‘safe’ enough level that the person feels comfortable to explore new options. If the environment is too challenging they will just use there pre existing behaviours to explore it. We need to design environments that will encourage the players to explore new behaviours while still being challenging enough for them
• By carefully manipulating constraints we can guide players into ‘metastable zones’. We can also use constraints to modify the landscape of affordances available

👨‍🏫Who should read this

This is a great article for anybody that is involved in coaching/teaching/art/architecture etc. There is quite a lot of information in it and you would need to have quite a good understanding of Ecological Dynamics to understand some of the concepts