What Makes the Ecological Approach “Ecological?”

"Ecological" isn't a marketing word. It actually means something, and it's not "games."

Ecological Dynamics (EcD) is starting to put a dent in the martial arts world, especially among Jiu Jitsu players. The conversation around the deficits of traditional approaches to training is hot and growing – and Ecological Dynamics proponents are fast gaining ground and a sympathetic ear.

With that popularity, however, comes an inevitable set of problems.

First, there’s already a watering down or outright lack of understanding about what Ecological Dynamics is. This leaves room for charlatans and posers to flood the discourse with bad information and poor advice. 

The underappreciated danger here is that the adoption of the ecological approach could actually just collapse back into a Information Processing (IP) approach (albeit game-heavy).

Second, EcD is being conflated purely with a games-based approach to training, stripped of its foundational content as a theory of motor control and learning. Without its core content, EcD is no different than anything else and there is nothing specifically ecological to promote.

To readers who are bought into ecological training: if we are promoting the ecological approach then we do not succeed if everyone plays more games but remains in an Information Processing framework.

In this article, I unpack what both halves of the Ecological Dynamics term mean. Moreover, I go into detail about the distinctive principles and doctrines of EcD and how they differ from traditional Information Processing theories.

The Ecological Approach vs Ecological Dynamics

The phrase “ecological approach” has several usages now. Most people probably use it as another way of referring to the constraints-led approach (CLA) or nonlinear pedagogy (virtually the same concepts). This is the least confusing usage, in my opinion. 

Dr. Rob Gray uses the phrase as an umbrella term for both CLA and differential learning, two separate motor learning and coaching methodologies. The confusion here is that CLA is underpinned theoretically by Ecological Dynamics, whereas differential learning is not. As far as I can tell, this is unique to Dr. Gray. So please be aware of this if you ever find yourself talking to ecological researchers.

However, there is a third sense that is far older than both usages. Originally, the “ecological approach” was a way of referring to J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology–which is purely concerned with perception and very little with internal processes, as psychology is traditionally. It’s derived from the title of his landmark work, An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

When coach Greg Souders uses the term “ecological approach,” he usually means Gibson’s approach to perception. When he talks about training methodology, he most often uses the term CLA.

What is “Ecological” About Ecological Dynamics?

Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environments. Those relationships shape behavior in that ecological system. For example, the water flow is shaped by the river bed, but the flow of water in turn shapes the river bed.

This in turn affects the plants, animals, and soil in that ecosystem, which can each in turn, to varying degrees, affect the nature and shape of the ecosystem from different directions in a continuous, nonlinear cycle of interaction.

Ecological Dynamics takes the base concept of ecology and focuses it specifically on how the learner (organism) and performance/practice space (environment) relationship contribute to skilled motor behavior.

Often, we will refer to the relationship of the learner and the training environment as the learner-environment system. This describes the mutual, reciprocal influence of the two upon each other, and thus the behavior of the couple (the “system”) as a whole.

What is a “Dynamic” in Ecological Dynamics?

Dynamics is the study of how forces affect the movement of bodies. With respect to ecological approaches, dynamics are the internal and external information sources (functioning as forces) that influence movement.

In the ecological approach, dynamics are most often conceptualized as constraints. A constraint influences a system by removing degrees of freedom in that system, so that it is more inclined to organize itself in one set of ways than others. In terms of motor behaviors, we might say coordinate rather than organize.

Skilled motor behavior, according to EcD, emerges as the product of continuously interacting constraints. This is where you start to see how it lays a firm foundation for the constraints-led approach. There are 3 primary categories of constraints that interact with one another to influence and produce system behavior:

• Individual

• Task

• Environment

Individual constraints are alternatively known as organismic constraints or intrinsic dynamics. It includes the physiology, fitness, psychology, and structure of the performer.

Task constraints can be understood as nominal information constraints. Other information constraints of this genre include instruction and coaching.

The environment constraint includes the practice or performance area and opponent–and in the case of competition, the referee and judges. All of these offer important information, but the opponent is the chief source of information for action in a martial arts match.

“Ecological” is also the Scale of Analysis…

Ecological Dynamics is also tricky because it prefers a higher level scale of analysis in its literature and concepts. The traditional approach is often myopically focused on things like biomechanics, often isolated from the performance environment or the interactions of other players.

Ecological Dynamics does not discount these findings, but understands that they are limited in merit of being isolated. In that way, literature focused too much on biomechanics and physiology often lacks ecological validity. 

(Note: “ecological validity” is a common science term and is not a category created by EcD people to invalidate other literatures. The basic idea is that the research is more ecologically valid if the research was conducted in the performance environment and not under laboratory conditions.)

Instead, ecological researchers prefer to study the athlete-environment system. That means all the players and other environmental influences together. The information that each constituent element of a system constitutes an ecosystem of influence on the emergent shape of that system.

Ecological researchers like to call this scale of analysis, and conceptualization of motor behavior, an “ecology of sport.”

Distinctives of Ecological Dynamics: Motor Control & Learning

In the traditional Information Processing approach, perceptual data must be processed through mental models or schema somewhere in the mind to be organized into usable information. Once the information is usable, discreetly stored memories are accessed to choose from a number of predetermined motor programs that can then be modified and executed.

In other words, there is a gap between your sense organs detecting data in the environment and the point at which that data becomes information which can be acted upon or influence action. What your sense organs first perceive is impoverished (even faulty) such that the brain must process it through a series of models or schema in order to remediate it into something actionable.

The ecological approach, indeed the entire theory of Ecological Dynamics, contradicts these assumptions. Instead, the structure of what you perceive is immediately comprehensible in some way or another. Additional processing is not needed to take that sensory input and make it actionable.

Rather, the ecological approach posits that humans perceive the world around them in terms of how they can (or cannot) act upon the environment—often called affordances.

Direct Perception

J.J. Gibson shook up the psychology and motor control world by proposing that humans engage in direct perception of information for action in their environments.

I explained earlier in this article how the traditional approach views sense stimulus as unusable until remediated or organized by models and schema in the brain. 

In contrast, the ecological approach to perception suggests that the various shapes, feels, and sounds that you detect are already comprehensible and thus usable. The only question is how familiar you are with the structure of the environment–a variable that affects your search for specifying information and sets novice movers apart from expert ones.

“Specifying information” is information in the environment that provides the most useful feedback for how to coordinate your limbs. There’s a lot of information in the environment, but not all of it is useful for controlling your actions. So, specifying information is the most useful information to find and monitor.

On this theory of perception, learners are not “burdened with the task of developing symbolic memory structures through training, observational modeling, and competitive performance; rather, the perceptual systems become progressively more attuned to specifying information available in environments through direct experience in practice and performance contexts” (Button et al., 2021).

Direct perception is a foundational part of an alternative model of motor control known as prospective control. A major part of prospective control is information-movement coupling, which I address in greater detail below. 

Information-Movement Coupling

This is also commonly referred to as perception-action coupling by ecological proponents. It is the idea that movements are directly paired to what an organism perceives in the environment. Information-movement coupling is predicated on direct perception.

Traditional views see coordination as a hard assembly. There’s a specific (or generalized) motor program stored somewhere in your head that needs to be pulled out, scaled to the action, and executed, almost like a computer program.

When martial artists think of a technique, they think of a rigid thing, a schematic or protocol that is stored somewhere that must be retrieved and executed when needed. It can be modified to the situation, but it has to be modified from whatever standard version that was originally encoded somewhere in the brain.

The traditional martial arts view of technique recollection is functionally the same as the Information Processing view: that motor programs are hard assembled by being recalled as a stored entity and then executed.

The ecological view is that each movement pattern that emerges during the course of a match is a soft assembly. It’s assembled directly to address what the body perceives, is thus scaled to that information, and the assemblages that create the same effects or otherwise address a movement problem are never the same.

Yes, even movements that would have been classified in the traditional approach as basically the same technique.

Learning as Perceptual Attunement

In the traditional approach, learning is dominantly measured by one’s acquisition of discreet techniques and their ability to perform them, firstly, in sterile environments. 

Once they have sufficient “good technique” under rote repetition, they are then expected to recall and execute (apply) that motor program under live resistance. In some traditional martial arts, they forgo the live practice entirely.

In Ecological Dynamics, learning is reconceptualized as an improvement of perception via a concept called perceptual attunement. Ecological thinkers like to talk about this concept in terms of search. 

You’re searching to detect specifying information, and in the process, you get better at filtering out useless information and more quickly finding the useful information.

Put another way, a learner’s perceptual system operates like a radio set, scanning the workspace for relevant information signals to show him what affordances are available for him to act upon. As learners improve, they learn to “tune in” to the signals that give them the most useful information while also learning to “tune out” irrelevant signals (static).

Perceptual attunement characterizes learning in Ecological Dynamics because long-term performance gains are tied directly to improved perception, or search.

The logic of this is not as difficult as it first seems:

Perception and action are so tightly coupled that it and all its stipulated skills (decision-making, movement coordination, etc) are interdependent. Because they’re interdependent, it follows that to facilitate greater movement solutions one must improve one’s perception of the environment via search. 

It also follows that, because they are so tightly coupled, that improved movement solutions provide better feedback information and thus also feed an improvement of perception in a reciprocal way.

In J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, perceptual attunement is known as the theory of direct learning. 

Is the Ecological Approach Just a “Games-based” Training Method?

No, the ecological approach is not simply a games-based methodology. It is a theory of motor learning, motor control, cognition, perception, and more broadly, system behavior.

There are many different games-based approaches to training, such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and Game-Sense. These games-based methodologies have similarities to the ecological approach, but they are not underpinned by the Ecological Dynamics theory of motor behavior.

Beyond a radically different way of understanding motor learning and control, the ecological approach is its own framework for designing games. The ecological approach to game design is often expressed through the principles of the constraints-led approach (CLA) or nonlinear pedagogy.

Conclusion

As proponents of this theory, it is in our best interest to clarify the foundational content of ecological dynamics, the so-called ecological approach.

The ecological approach is not just “training through games.” It is primarily and fundamentally a different view of motor learning and control.

Reference

Button, C., Seifert, L., Chow, J.Y., Araujo, D., Davids, K. (2021). Dynamics of skill acquisition: An ecological dynamics approach (2nd ed.). Human Kinetics.