Optimizing Performative Skills in Social Interaction: Insights From Embodied Cognition, Music Education, and Sport Psychology

Abstract

Embodied approaches to cognition conceive of mental life as emerging from the ongoing relationship between neural and extra-neural resources. The latter include, first and foremost, our entire body, but also the activity patterns enacted within a contingent milieu, cultural norms, social factors, and the features of the environment that can be used to enhance our cognitive capacities (e.g., tools, devices, etc.). Recent work in music education and sport psychology has applied general principles of embodiment to a number of social contexts relevant to their respective fields. In particular, both disciplines have contributed fascinating perspectives to our understanding of how skills are acquired and developed in groups; how musicians, athletes, teachers, and coaches experience their interactions; and how empathy and social action participate in shaping effective performance. In this paper, we aim to provide additional grounding for this research by comparing and further developing original themes emerging from this cross-disciplinary literature and empirical works on how performative skills are acquired and optimized. In doing so, our discussion will focus on: (1) the feeling of being together, as meaningfully enacted in collective musical and sport events; (2) the capacity to skillfully adapt to the contextual demands arising from the social environment; and (3) the development of distributed forms of bodily memory. These categories will be discussed from the perspective of embodied cognitive science and with regard to their relevance for music education and sport psychology. It is argued that because they play a key role in the acquisition and development of relevant skills, they can offer important tools to help teachers and coaches develop novel strategies to enhance learning and foster new conceptual and practical research in the domains of music and sport.

Music Teachers’ Perspectives and Experiences of Ensemble and Learning Skills

“…In both collective and individual tuition, open dialogue and reflection can stimulate the musician and the pupil rethink their approach to learning. This resonates with recent accounts on skill acquisition that emphasize the value of collectivity for developing different abilities in sport and music (see e.g., Davids et al, 2013;Schiavio et al, 2019a). Rather than understanding skills as properties of the lone individual, this research suggests that we may in fact consider how external contingencies take an important, even co-constitutive role in skill development, as we are always immersed in a community of practice, with peers, teachers, technology, as well as their associated social and historical dimensions.…”

Learning Music From Each Other: Synchronization, Turn-taking, or Imitation?

“…This is consistent with the main insights from 4E cognitive science discussed above: as living systems create their own experience through action rather than through representational recovery, much of their cognitive life is dynamically looped with social and physical resources of their bodies and surrounding environments (Chemero, 2009;Thompson, 2007; see also Malafouris, 2013Malafouris, , 2015. The intersection of gestures and actions emerging from learning settings based on synchrony and turn-taking appears to facilitate the collective and individual acquisition and development of skill (see Schiavio, Gesbert, Reybrouck, Hauw, & Parncutt, 2019), being implemented by ''ongoing feedback loops that transform our cognitive profile in real-time and help us negotiate complex cognitive tasks'' (Krueger, 2019, p. 48). This is particularly interesting from an ''extended mind'' perspective, which is increasingly applied to musical contexts (Cochrane, 2008;Kersten, 2017;Ryan & Schiavio, 2019): the theory holds that under certain conditions, living systems can realize part of their cognitive processes thanks to various forms of external scaffolding involving physical and social elements (Clark & Chalmers, 1998).…”

Processes and Experiences of Creative Cognition in Seven Western Classical Composers

“…Yet a series of fascinating studies with undergraduates and young children involved in collaborative compositions (e.g., Barrett, 1998 ; Kratus, 1989 ; MacDonald et al, 2000 ; Morgan, 1999 ), and recent work in peer-to-peer music education, emphasise the role of reciprocal interaction for musical development and flourishing (see Johansen & Nielsen, 2019 ). Other work in the field of skill acquisition points to a distinctive role of sociality even in seemingly individual situations ( Schiavio, Gesbert et al, 2019 ; see also Høffding & Satne, 2019 ). Here, the idea is that skills are always negotiated within a community of practice, and therefore cannot be nurtured or enhanced without its involvement.…”