The sense of agency and its role in strategic control for expert mountain bikers.

Abstract

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks.

Habitual Reflexivity and Skilled Action

“…It seems that through deliberate and discursive practice performers develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how to use executive control (Toner et al, 2016). For example, as one becomes more sensitive to the parametric structures that govern performance one learns how to use this information for top-down adjustment of proximal and strategic control (Christensen et al, 2015).…”

Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of Skill Experience

“…In a companion paper we discuss similarities and differences between the accounts. In a companion paper(Christensen et al, 2015b), we discuss similarities and differences between the accounts.© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd…”

The Paradox of Post‐Performance Amnesia

“…As I have argued elsewhere, I think it is reasonable to maintain that experts in a range of disciplines, including dance, engage in attention‐demanding processing, that experts “think in action” (Montero ). Support for the think‐in‐action principle, or what I shall call here “Stravinsky’s dictum,” encompasses, among other things, think‐aloud studies, in which highly skilled individuals are asked to vocalize their thoughts while performing (Whitehead, Taylor, and Polman ), phenomenological investigations (Christensen et al ; Høffding, ), diary studies and other retrospective methods (Oudejans et al ; Nicholls et al ), and good old fashioned a priori reasoning: given that experts practice with conscious focus, and, given that a change in focus can throw one off, it is at least sometimes advisable to maintain a conscious focus on one’s action while performing (Montero ). To be sure, all such studies (to say nothing of the a priori reasoning) have their limitations, some of which I discuss in Montero ().…”