Interpersonal pattern dynamics and adaptive behavior of multiple agents in team sports: A model and data

Ideas from ecological psychology and nonlinear dynamics characterize adaptive behavior as an emergent property of self-organization processes in the interpersonal interactions that occur between multiple agents in complex social systems such as industrial organizations, academic institutions and sports teams. A conceptual model, proposed to capture constraints on dynamics of decisions and actions in multi-agent systems, was empirically evaluated in simulations of interpersonal interactions in team sports. For this purpose, co-adaptive interpersonal dynamics in the team sport of Rugby Union were studied to model control parameter and collective variable relations in attacker-defender dyads. Videogrammetry analysis revealed how attackers used displacement velocity to generate fluctuations and create phase transitions to destabilize dyadic sub-systems near the try line. Although interpersonal dynamics of multiple agents exhibited characteristics of chaotic attractors, the informational constraints of the team sport of Rugby Union boxed the systems into a low dimensional attractor. Data suggested that decisions and actions of agents in complex systems such as work organizations, academic institutions and sports teams may be characterized as emergent properties, governed by laws of dynamical systems at the ecological scale. Further work is needed to generalize this conceptual model of adaptive behavior in performance to other populations of multiple agents.