Sport Qualia: Toward a Structural Approach to Subjective Sport Experience

Abstract

Sport experience is rich in sensations that only the person feeling them can know: the feel of movement, the interaction with the environment, and the fatigue or pleasant mood that follows exercise.For the most part, sport science has measured the body objectively, building on physiology and physics.While subjective measures do abound in sport science, it is mostly as adjuncts to objective indices; the subjective experience of sport itself tends to be overlooked as an object of inquiry in its own right.Coaches and scientists often face a significant disconnect between objective data and an athlete's subjective experience.This chapter addresses qualitative and subjective aspects experienced in sport (what we call sport qualia) using the qualia structure framework now being developed in consciousness research.We first describe the limits of conventional methods, which measure experience along a few preselected axes, and then review prior work on sport qualia along two lines: the sensations of the moving subject and the changes in mood and cognition that exercise brings.As an alternative to traditional measurement methods, we introduce the qualia structure approach, which does not fix the axes in advance but rather builds the structure of experience from the relations among qualia, subjective similarity being one such relation.In practice, this approach can reveal where a coach's, a professional athlete's, and a beginner's sensations align and where they diverge, thereby informing coaching practice, among other things.More broadly, it may help reunify a field of sport science that has long been fragmented across its parent disciplines.