Shared Knowledge or Shared Affordances? Insights from an Ecological Dynamics Approach to Team Coordination in Sports

Previous research has proposed that team coordination is based on shared knowledge of the performance context, responsible for linking teammates’ mental representations for collective, internalized action solutions. However, this representational approach raises many questions including: how do individual schemata of team members become reformulated together? How much time does it take for this collective cognitive process to occur? How do different cues perceived by different individuals sustain a general shared mental representation? This representational approach is challenged by an ecological dynamics perspective of shared knowledge in team coordination. We argue that the traditional shared knowledge assumption is predicated on ‘knowledge about’ the environment, which can be used to share knowledge and influence intentions of others prior to competition. Rather, during competitive performance, the control of action by perceiving surrounding informational constraints is expressed in ‘knowledge of’ the environment. This crucial distinction emphasizes perception of shared affordances (for others and of others) as the main communication channel between team members during team coordination tasks. From this perspective, the emergence of coordinated behaviours in sports teams is based on the formation of interpersonal synergies between players resulting from collective actions predicated on shared affordances.