In this episode of the River Tiger Podcast, host Marianne Davies speaks with Danny Hatcher, whose work sits at the intersection of sports coaching, ecological psychology, Deaf awareness, and technology/AI.

Danny introduces his background in strength and conditioning and sports coaching and explains how a seemingly simple example about a table having “affordances” drew him into ecological psychology. He shares his lived experience of being half deaf and half blind, his journey into British Sign Language (BSL), and his growing involvement in the Deaf community, where he now volunteers and advocates for Deaf awareness in “hearing world” environments such as sport.

A major thread of the conversation is Danny’s ecological approach to coach development and skill learning at his trampoline club. He describes how most of trampolining is really about “safe crashing” and “falling with style,” and how traditional coaching models, focused on a single “correct” technique, can create fear and hesitation in parents, helpers, and newcomers. Instead, he designs open, exploratory environments where participants (including adults and parents) learn by exploring movement, making mistakes, and discovering multiple solutions to motor problems, rather than trying to reproduce one ideal model.

Marianne and Danny unpack common safety concerns in sport, contrasting the perceived danger of “doing it wrong” with the actual reality of well-managed, exploratory practice in maintained, supervised environments. They highlight how changing the environment (e.g., adding or removing mats) changes perception and action, and how being skilled often means being good at adapting and recovering from errors, not just performing a perfect form. Throughout, Danny links these ideas back to ecological psychology, disability, and how we can shift coaches’ and parents’ questions from “How do I correct this?” to “What motor problem is this person solving, and how can I help them explore more solutions?”

This podcast was recorded in response the publication of 'The myth of Optimality in Human Movement Science' by Madhur Mangalam.

I recorded this episode some time ago but it has been a tough year and I have not published any podcasts. I lost my beloved River Tiger this year - it's still very raw but I do want to discuss that in another episode. My motivation is stronger for continuing to explore skill adaptation in equestrian and adventure sports so despite the need to prioritise my PhD thesis, I will endeavour to publish some episodes this year.

The "myth of optimality" in human movement science critiques the idea that there's one "perfect" way to move, arguing that evolution produces sufficient adaptations, not perfect solutions, and that movement is dynamic, context-dependent, and adaptive. This flawed concept, often used in biomechanics and motor control, ignores the body's ability to find flexible solutions based on task, environment (e.g., running on a track vs. trail), and internal states (fatigue), proposing instead that performance emerges from complex, multi-scale processes, not a fixed, optimal blueprint.

This discussion explores the concept of optimality in human and equine movement sciences. Madhur Mangalam, an assistant professor of biomechanics, critiques the optimality framework, arguing it oversimplifies complex movements. He emphasises the importance of variability and context in movement, citing his viral paper on the myth of optimality. Marianne and Madhur discuss the need for a more empathetic, constraint-aware approach in coaching and the limitations of lab-based research in capturing real-world movement dynamics.

This is a link to my guest on this episode: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-education-health-and-human-sciences/biomechanics-core-facility/about-us/directory/madhur-mangalam.php

Madhur Mangalam is an accomplished Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomechanics at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. He has a stellar academic background, earning his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Life Sciences from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune, India. His insatiable curiosity and passion for understanding the human mind led him to complete his Ph.D. in Psychology at the renowned University of Georgia in Athens, followed by rigorous postdoctoral training in Neuroscience at Northeastern University in Boston.Dr. Mangalam's research pursuits are at the forefront of interdisciplinary innovation, primarily focusing on unraveling the nonlinear dynamical principles that underlie perception-action mechanisms and embodied/embedded cognition. His scholarly journey is marked by a commitment to advancing our understanding of these intricate processes. Furthermore, he is a pioneer in developing cutting-edge nonlinear analytical methods, which play a pivotal role in uncovering and deciphering these fundamental principles. With his exceptional academic journey and dedication to pushing the boundaries of knowledge, Dr. Mangalam continues to make impactful contributions to biomechanics, psychology, and neuroscience.

This is the paper we are discussing:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390322410_The_myth_of_optimality_in_human_movement_science

The paper by Jane Clark:

This is an excellent overview of the paper by Rob Gray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgR5g7rZxT4

Clark, J. E. (1995). On Becoming Skillful: Patterns and Constraints. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 66(3), 173–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.

Ed Baggs, assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark, joins me for a conversation about his research on affordances. I invited Ed to join me after reading his latest (preprint) paper ‘The Affordance Hypothesis. In this paper Ed and his co-author Vicente Raja delve into affordance research, using examples like an African fish eagle hunting bee-eaters to illustrate direct perception.

Ed discusses his journey from traditional cognitive science to exploring affordances in language and human interactions. Though the paper they reference, among many others, James's Principles of Psychology and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to contextualise Gibson's work. Ed emphasises the need to move beyond categorisation-based thinking to a field-based approach, using action boundaries to operationalise affordances.

As a key part of the operationalisation problem (how to study affordances without falling back into categorical thinking), Ed explains the long-standing debate over affordances' ontological status, referencing Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique and Turvey et al.'s response. In their paper, Ed and Vicente propose viewing affordances as regions of movement space rather than categories.

The discontinuity problem addresses how humans use language to categorise things, and therefore perceive affordances differently from other animals.

The conversation also touches on the practical implications for coaches and athletes, emphasising the importance of shared perceptions and meaningful affordances.

There is so much in here. It is worth listening to Episode 60 with Dr Andrew Wilson for an introduction to affordances, and to Episode 1 with Dr James Stafford and Warren Lampard for a conversation about action boundaries and using affordances in practice.

About my guest

Edward Baggs is assistant professor in humanities at the University of Southern Denmark and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His work focuses on the problem of scaling up embodied cognitive science beyond the individual mind to encompass collaborative activity as well as cognitive development and language. His current interests include direct social perception theory and developing field-based methods for observing cognition in everyday settings.

Links

Ed Baggs on ‘x’ https://x.com/edbaggs/status/1867584095720779812

Preprint full paper DOI https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xu4wk

YouTube clip of the African Fish Eagle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-BSDZ7iqc&pp=ygUWYWZyaWNhbiBmaXNoIGVhZ2xlIGJiYw%3D%3D

Karen Adolph visual cliff research clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WanGt1G6ScA

How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson's “ecological approach.' J.A. Fodor, & Z.W. Pylyshyn (1981) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027781900093?via%3Dihub

Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981) Turvey et al. (1981) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/16000703_Ecological_laws_of_perceiving_and_acting_In_reply_to_Fodor_and_Pylyshyn_1981