Watch someone do the dishes, or a billion dollar robot (built on top of the work of tens of thousands of the most brilliant engineers) find and lift a wooden cube — and the skills used for everyday tasks become obvious.

Yet the ease with which we humans learn and carry out such tasks is generally taken for granted. Such everyday movement activities are viewed as unsophisticated, perhaps because academic training is not required to achieve them, or perhaps because people who do this kind of physical labour for a living occupy the lowest rung of society.

The bias against the view that physical action is cognitively sophisticated is so deeply rooted that psychology, the science of mental life and behaviour, has paid scant attention to it. If looked at at all, movement experiments in psychology are more often viewed as a window into perception and cognition than as a topic of interest in its own right. In fact, most professors of psychology themselves don’t seem to be too sophisticated in movement — if they exceed the bare minimum of movement skills required to get through their days at all.