Action in Context: A Unified Framework to Comprehend Learning Everyday Skills

The anthropological literature is rich in examples of cultural forms of gestuality, highlighting the wide range of human motor habits. In recent years, the psychological community has become increasingly concerned with the need to place behavior analysis within an ecosystem more respectful of real life. Acknowledging the difficulty of approaching complex skills through a prescriptive framework, the aim of the present article, rooted in the ecological-dynamical approach, proposes a functional framework for analyzing the learning of complex motor skills. The great diversity of real-world skills thus appears as an ideal “laboratory setting.” The issue addressed here is the following: why is an everyday task as “simple” as eating, which unveils a great diversity in its daily realization, be of interest to understanding the learning of real-life skills? Two cases illustrate this discussion: learning a percussive task, i.e., cracking a nut, and performing a dance figure in two cultural backgrounds, i.e., pivot-turn.