Understanding sport skills through the theories of visual perception: Contrasting cognitive and ecological approaches

BACKGROUND: Understanding sport skills through the theories of visual perception brings the debate to the level of basic and applied components of science, characterizing contributions from the most relevant approaches in the field of Motor Behavior, the indirect and the direct paradigms.

AIM AND FINDINGS: The first section of this article emphasizes theoretical assumptions of visual perception arising from indirect and direct approaches; the notion of relative utility of these perspectives in explaining vision is discussed, which includes analysis of the goals of explanation, prediction, and simplicity. The second section is devoted to demonstrate critical insufficiencies of indirect perspective. The third and final section focuses on the ecological dynamics account applied to sports, with emphasis on elements of decision-making and motor control. Ecological dynamics is shown as an interesting alternative to understand sport skills, accounting for involved complexities of perception, decision-making, and action.