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Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks.

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We investigate flexibility and problem solving in skilled action. We conducted a field study of mountain bike riding that required a learner rider to cope with major changes in technique and equipment. Our results indicate that relatively inexperienced individuals can be capable of fairly complex 'on-the-fly' problem solving which allows them to cope with new conditions. This problem solving is hard to explain for classical theories of skill because the adjustments are too large to be achieved by automatic mechanisms and too complex and rapid to be achieved by cognitive processes as they are usually understood. A recent theory, Mesh, can explain these results because it posits that skill-specific cognitive abilities develop during skill learning and that control typically involves an interplay between cognitive and automatic mechanisms. Here we develop Mesh further, providing a detailed explanation for these problem solving abilities. We argue that causal representation, metacognitive awareness and other forms of performance awareness combine in the formulation and control of action strategies. We also argue that the structure of control present in this case is inconsistent with Bratman's model of intentions, and that, in the face of high uncertainty and risk, intentions can be much more labile than Bratman recognises. In addition, we found limitations and flaws in problem solving which illuminate the representations involved. Finally, we highlight the crucial role of social and cultural learning in the development of complex skills.

Research on expert skills is harder than studying particular cognitive processes -remembering, hearing, grieving, and so on -because its domain is less neatly bounded. Skill and expertise are multi-level, composite phenomena: multi-level in that they involve neural, cognitive, aff ective, motor, social, technological, and cultural processes and resources all at once, composite in that expert musicians or sportspeople are deploying many integrated psychological, bodily, and social capacities all at once, from perception and attention through emotion and memory to precise movement coordination and interactive communication.In a provocative paper for the new Journal of Expertise , Fernand Gobet laments that 'the current state of research into expertise is problematic as knowledge is currently fragmented and communication between disciplines is poor'. This is 'regrettable, as many contradictions between the disciplines have been ignored and many opportunities for cross-fertilization missed' (2018: 1, 5).We embrace Gobet's challenge: 'the way forward for the fi eld of expertise is to join forces and carry out multi-disciplinary research' (2018: 5). We highlight skill phenomena much discussed by expert practitioners, specialist applied researchers, and philosophers infl uenced by phenomenology and ethnography, which have received less attention in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind. We focus on (a) the embodied experience of (b) real expert performers in (c) real domains of practice, as they deploy (d) richly embedded strategies in (e) full and challenging ecological settings.This should not be a surprising 'turn' in the fi eld: while there are many reasonable ways to study skill, one useful path is to fi nd, track, closely observe, and listen to experts. This is a natural route to striking case studies, new puzzles, suggestive angles on existing questions, mature empirical traditions, and rich bodies of theory. While here we take the arts and, primarily, sport as our core domains, this kind of naturalistic or natural philosophy of expertise also operates in other fi elds, from medical diagnosis and surgery to emergency response, from aviation to software engineering, from teaching to science. These fi elds have long been investigated empirically,