Skilled action

Abstract

I focus on problems defining skill and a core theoretical dispute over whether skilled action is largely automatic or consciously controlled. The dominant view in philosophy and psychology has been that skills are automatic, but an emerging body of work suggests that conscious cognition plays a significant role.

The relationship between habits and motor skills in humans

“…Examples range from innate skills that we often take for granted, such as walking and reaching [21][22][23], to everyday skills (e.g., driving or touch-typing) that most of us acquire later in life, to skills that only a few people possess at an elite level, such as playing the violin. Formally defining motor skill and determining what behaviors should qualify as being skilled has not proven straightforward and remains a contentious topic [24]. An uncontroversial definition might be that a skill is an acquired capability to successfully achieve a task goal.…”

“…For example, professional soccer players are thought to intelligently read the field [49], perhaps similarly to the ability of chess masters to read board positions [50]. Considerable phenomenological evidence supports the idea that cognition is crucial to performing advanced motor skills (e.g., [24,45,51]), and allows us to flexibly select and control actions to achieve a goal under different circumstances. For example, when encountering changes in an environment, we are able to use cognitive strategies to adjust welllearned actions to counter the change [52].…”

Embodied skillful performance: where the action is

“…This view is labelled intellectualism (Stanley and Williamson 2017) and can be seen as the broader rubric under which falls our target in this article, namely, instructionism. At the root of such unifying models of skill is the instructionist assumption, which would allow for the construction of a general theory of skill, with epistemic attributes such as generativity, abstract rules or norms, and patterns of learning (Christensen 2019;Christensen and Sutton 2018).…”

The relationship between habits and motor skills in humans

“…Examples include innate skills like walking or reaching that we often take for granted since they develop naturally [21], to everyday skills like driving or touch-typing that most of us acquire later in life, to skills that only a few people possess at an elite level, such as playing the violin. Formally defining motor skill and determining what behaviors should qualify as skills has not proven to be straightforward and remains a contentious topic [22]. An uncontroversial definition might be that a skill is an acquired capability of successfully achieving a goal in a given task, usually requiring significant practice.…”

“…For example, professional soccer players are thought to intelligently read the field well [42], perhaps similarly to chess masters' ability to read board positions [43]. Considerable phenomenological evidence supports the idea that cognition is critical to performing advanced motor skills [e.g., 22,38], allowing us to flexibly select and control actions to achieve a goal under different circumstances. For example, when encountering changes in an environment, we are able to use cognitive strategies to adjust well-learned actions to counter the change [44].…”