OPERATION VULCAN: 4 categories of skill

In Vulcan 2 and Vulcan 3 I established the fact that every physical skill is a job‐relevant sensori‐motor activity. Some confusion is introduced when people start talking about sensori‐motor skills. Not all people mean the same thing when they use the term sensori‐motor skill. The purist — a rare enough bird anyway in the training business — would mean any activity with sensory and motor elements, no matter how simple or common they were. However the term has come to have a special meaning: some skill with some advanced or unusual sensory element or some unusual, rare, refined motor element or both, not found in the normal domestic skill repertoire. On a strict use of words all skills are sensori‐motor but one has to bow before the storm of common usage and accept the term sensori‐motor skill as meaning a skill with advanced sensory and/or motor elements. In order to avoid confusion, as far as this is possible, I prefer to call this type of skill an advanced sensori‐motor skill to mean that it has something unusual in one or both of the elements.