Numerous studies have underlined the importance of contextual information sharing during the performance of cooperative tasks. Our study was based on the notion of shared context (Salembier &?Zouinar, 2004) and analyzed the forms of contextual information sharing that occur during two types of sports interaction: cooperation and competition. We worked within the theoretical and methodological framework of the ?course of action? (Theureau, 1992), according to the main assumptions of the situated cognition paradigm.
Four national-level table tennis players volunteered to participate in the study. We studied the collective activity of two partners in a doubles table tennis match (cooperative interaction) and two opponents during a singles match (competitive interaction) during a national competition. The matches were videotaped, and the players? verbalizations as they viewed the tapes were collected a?posteriori. The data were processed by (a) transcribing the players?actions and verbalizations (b) determining the meaningful structures in each player?s course of action, and (c) analyzing how contextual information was shared by reconstructing the collective interaction of the two players?courses of action.
Our results characterized what kind of information was shared by the players, and revealed three typical forms of contextual information sharing that alternated during both types of interaction: symmetrical sharing, asymmetrical sharing, and no sharing. These three typical forms of sharing appeared in different situations according to the type of interaction, and the players regulated the forms of sharing by implementing different processes. Our results also showed that the players implemented a verification process to determine whether the interpretations they had constructed on the basis of shared contextual information were plausible.
Our results confirmed that sharing contextual information is an activity that emerges from the accomplishment of action and joint access to the resources present in the context. They point to the importance of interpretive activity in the construction of mutual intelligibility and suggest the undetermined and complex character of this intelligibility. In both cooperative and competitive interactions, mutual intelligibility is achieved by a permanent co-construction that operates with the aid of several processes (exploration, monitoring, display of certain aspects of one?s activity, focusing, and masking).