In recent decades, concepts and ideas from James J. Gibson’s theory of direct perception in ecological psychology have been applied to the study of how perception and action regulate sport performance. This article examines the influence of different streams of thought in ecological psychology for studying cognition and action in the diverse behavioural contexts of sport and exercise. In discussing the origins of ecological psychology it can be concluded that psychologists such as Lewin, and to some extent Heider, provided the initial impetus for the development of key ideas. We argue that the papers in this special issue clarify that the different schools of thinking in ecological psychology have much to contribute to theoretical and practical developments in sport and exercise psychology. For example, Gibson emphasized and formalized how the individual is coupled with the environment; Brunswik raised the issue of the ontology of probability in human behaviour and the problem of representative design for experimental task constraints; Barker looked carefully into extra-individual behavioural contexts and Bronfenbrenner presented insights pertinent to the relations between behaviour contexts, andmacro influences on behaviour. In this overview, we highlight essential issues fromthemain schools of thought of relevance to the contexts of sport and exercise, and we consider some potential theoretical linkages with dynamical systems theory.

While the vast majority of publications in sport psychology look inward, in this paper we look outward to examine the relationship of the athlete to her environment. We describe the theoretical foundations and methodological implications of Egon Brunswik’s “probabilistic functionalism” and contrast that with the dominant theory and method of psychological research, namely the “rule of one variable”. We explain the importance of Brunswik’s concept of “representative design” if sport psychologists want to generalize their results from their studies to the competitive environment. We then use examples from the sport of tennis to show how probabilistic functionalism and representative design can be used in studying and training athletes.

The first part of this paper gives an overview of (Barkerian) psychological ecology, its origin, its classical research tradition, and its further developments up to the present. Roger G. Barker aspired to complement (mainly) experimental psychology by establishing a psychological ecology modeled on biological ecology. In a field station (1947-1972) his research group applied two essentially different approaches of “naturalistic” methodology aimed at describing and analysing people’s everyday behaviour in a small rural town. – How could this research perspective and tradition be relevant to sport psychology? The second part of the paper tries to answer these questions, primarily by attempting to locate Barkerian psychological ecology within the network of sport sciences. Reflecting on one of sport psychology’s major tasks (producing “if-then-knowledge” aimed at improving sport performance) reveals that psychological ecology’s relevance has a fundamentally different emphasis. The analysis of various examples demonstrates how this peculiar kind of relevance can be utilised.

The theory of affordances, a conceptual pillar of the ecological approach to perception and action, has the potential to become a guiding principle for research on perception and action in sport. Affordances are opportunities for action. They describe the environment in terms of behaviors that are possible at a given moment under a given set of conditions. Affordances capture the tight coupling between perception and action, and allow for the prospective and moment-to-moment control of activity that is characteristic of fluent, fast-paced behavior on the playing field. We begin with an overview of the ecological approach and the principle of direct perception, using past research on interceptive action to illustrate how this principle has been put to work to capture information-movement relations in perceptualmotor skill. We then review theory and research on body-scaled, action-scaled, and social affordances, highlighting outstanding questions that provide opportunities for new research on affordances in the context of sport.We conclude with consideration of affordances as providing a functional semantics for sports.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to discuss the process of building the Bioecological Theory of Human Development, with emphasis on its four components: proximal processes, biopsychological characteristics of a developing person, the parameters of the ecological context, and the dimension of time. As a complementary objective this paper will propose a possible application of Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical structure to the field of sport.
Development: The paper was divided into three parts. The first one was dedicated to analyzing the building process of the bioecological theory. The analysis included brief comments of some of Bronfenbrenner’s assumptions and definitions, as well as the components of his model: proximal processes, which are determined by the interactions between characteristics of the person, the context and the time; biopsychological characteristics of a developing person, which are identified as disposition, resources and demands; the parameters of the ecological context, characterized as microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem; the dimension of time, presented as microtime, mesotime and macrotime. The second part analyzed Bronfenbrenner’s effort to put theory into research designs. An original classification of research is commented: research on the discovery mode and research on the confirmatory mode. The third part discussed Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical structure applied in the field of sport. A theoretical model based on the Bioecological Theory of Human Development is discussed. The model proposes an analysis of the development of sport talents as a phenomenon of proximal processes and their interactions with personal attributes, ecological settings, and dimensions of time.
Conclusion: After the publication ofMaking Human Beings Human, in 2005, the great legacy of Urie Bronfenbrenner, his Bioecological Theory of Human Development, was concluded. Back in the seventies it is possible to see his first attempt to build an interface between developmental research and public policy. The phenomenon discussed in this paper, development of sports talent, has variables representing all the four components of the bioecological model, and perhaps it is time to use Bronfenbrenner’s model to follow the process of developing future athletes.

The objective of this paper is to comment on four ecological approaches to sport activity which are based on the conceptions of Urie Bronfenbrenner, Roger G. Barker, Egon Brunswik and James J. Gibson. Their consensual general message is that to sufficiently explain, predict and improve some behaviour it is necessary to study the objective properties of the environmental context in which this behaviour takes place. Concerning their peculiarities, it is shown that each of these approaches provides particular contributions to an extended theoretical understanding of sport activity. However, the most profit will be gained when focusing on their complementarities within an integrative frame of reference. In this sense, a promising perspective is provided by action theory. Action theory is designed as a systems approach to the person-environment interrelation, assuming that the human-specific core of this interrelation is the intentional organisation of behaviour within a meaningful situational context, i.e., action. It is shown that this perspective is capable to embody and interconnect central aspects of different ecological approaches according to their particular significance within the dynamics of situated action. The main focus, however, is on further differentiation of the organisation of action with regard to a comprehensive understanding of the psychological nature of the person-environment interrelation. The essentials of this conception are briefly outlined with special reference to the structure of action situations and the functional architecture of actions.

The objective of this paper is to discuss proximal process as a key concept for the understanding of the bioecological paradigm, as well as to answer the comments regarding the use of the Bioecological Theory of Human Development as a theoretical framework for the field of sport psychology. In a similar vein with Gibson, who created the term affordance to explain environmental properties taken in reference with the person, Bronfenbrenner created the term proximal processes to describe the interaction between the person’s attributes, the characteristics of the environment, and the properties of time, as the primary engines of development. The order of the answer follows the sequence in which the comments were presented. In this reaction paper we try to clarify some weakness pointed in our major paper, related to the four components of Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory: proximal processes, biopsychological characteristics of a developing person, the parameters of the ecological context, and the dimension of time.