The resonant system: Linking brain–body–environment in sport performance ☆

The ecological dynamics approach offers new insights to understand how athlete nervous systems are embedded within the body-environment system in sport. Cognitive neuroscience focuses on the neural bases of athlete behaviors in terms of perceptual, cognitive, and motor functions defined within specific brain structures. Here, we discuss some limitations of this traditional perspective, addressing how athletes functionally adapt perception and action to the dynamics of complex performance environments by continuously perceiving information to regulate goal-directed actions. We examine how recent neurophysiological evidence of functioning in diverse cortical and subcortical regions appears more compatible with an ecological dynamics perspective, than traditional views in cognitive neuroscience. We propose how athlete behaviors in sports may be related to the tuning of resonant mechanisms indicating that perception is a dynamic process involving the whole body of the athlete. We emphasize the important role of metastable dynamics in the brain-body-environment system facilitating continuous interactions with a landscape of affordances (opportunities for action) in a performance environment. We discuss implications of these ideas for performance preparation and practice design in sport.