Beyond the Transfer Gap: Ecological Dynamics and the Future of Police Training

Police training produces a well-documented transfer gap: officers perform well in training environments but significantly worse under operational conditions. This paper argues that the gap is not adequately explained by insufficient resources or training hours alone. A major contributor is the set of assumptions about human learning embedded in training design itself: that skill is a stored program to be retrieved and executed, that complex skills are assembled from simple parts, and that perception and action are sequential processes. These assumptions, inherited from information-processing traditions, produce training environments systematically misaligned with the demands of the field. Ecological dynamics, grounded in Gibson’s ecological psychology and developed for skill acquisition by Davids and colleagues, offers a coherent alternative framework. It treats skill as the ability to establish functional relationships between performer and environment under varying conditions. The constraints-led approach translates this framework into training design through four principles: intention, constrain to afford, representative design, and repetition without repetition. The paper extends the framework beyond perceptual-motor skill using Vervaeke’s four kinds of knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory) and proposes a research agenda for the criminal justice community.