AI Insight
This conceptual analysis introduces the Contact–Agency Framework to examine how physical touch and contact influence athletic performance through tactile sensation, haptic perception, and body-environment interactions. The framework distinguishes between environmental haptic information that supports skill calibration, interpersonal touch that guides or constrains action depending on relational factors like consent and power, and digital mediation that can expand access or displace judgment based on interface design. The authors use disability sport and Taijiquan push-hands as case studies to challenge visual-dominant models of athletic skill.
Why it matters
This framework provides coaches, sports scientists, and technology designers with a systematic approach to understanding how contact-based information shapes athletic training and performance. It has practical applications for improving coaching methods, designing haptic feedback systems, and making sports more accessible to athletes with disabilities.
Understand the Science
Sport is often analyzed through visual, physiological, or cognitive models, yet athletes also act through pressure, flow, friction, rebound, thermal change, bodily guidance, proximity, and vibration. These phenomena are usually examined separately in research on perceptual skill, coaching and safeguarding, disability access, and haptic technology. This conceptual analysis develops the Contact–Agency Framework to compare how body–environment, body–other, and body–technology contact reorganize opportunities to perceive, interpret, calibrate, regulate, contest, and delegate action-relevant judgment. A structured, purposive synthesis distinguishes tactile sensation, tactile perception, haptic perception, and haptic experience; treats proprioception, kinesthesia, and task-relevant thermoreception as analytically distinct but functionally coupled; and positions interoception, pain, fatigue, and affective touch as adjacent modulators. Environmental haptic information may support skilled calibration when it is detectable, discriminable, and task relevant. Interpersonal touch may guide or constrain depending on relational authorization, power, consent, and contestability. Digital mediation may expand access or displace judgment depending on mediation function, feedback schedule, interface transparency, and user control. Disability sport and Taijiquan push-hands function as analytically demanding boundary cases that expose limits of visually dominant and one-directional accounts. Five propositions specify candidate indicators, measurement designs, expected patterns, boundary conditions, and limitations. The framework is offered as a mid-level analytical heuristic, not a general theory of touch.