Expert performance in real-world settings involves fluidly blending multiple types of competencies. A review of skill theories in the motor domain reveals that cognitivist approaches emphasize conceptual and knowledge-based control, while 4E cognition theories stress sensorimotor coupling; both are too limited alone but complementary. Different mechanisms—such as sensorimotor cognition, body reflexivity, action imagery, strategic control, and declarative knowledge—become dynamically entangled in skilled behavior. To study this interfacing, high-grainsize qualitative process analysis ('coalescence analysis') is needed. The author argues against attempts to assimilate higher cognition into sensorimotor frameworks, instead endorsing a view of functional integration where higher cognition is treated on its own terms yet dynamically embedded in embodied couplings.
Regulating systems with multiple causes and non-linear dynamics—such as therapeutic, economic, or ecological systems—requires a distinct skill set not captured by existing frameworks. Drawing on dynamic systems theory and “4E” cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended), this work redefines the regulator's agency as skillfully imposing constraints to create openings for self-organizing dynamics, rather than exerting direct control. Expert regulators apply multi-pronged, multi-timescale constraints for nuanced effects, including scarcely noted enactive competencies for “emergence management” omitted by intellectualistic accounts. The author advocates treating regulation and target system dynamics symmetrically, grounding competencies in complexity theory.