Predictive strategies for the control of complex motor skills: recent insights into individual and joint actions

Humans perform exquisite sensorimotor skills, both individually and in teams, from athletes performing rhythmic gymnastics to everyday tasks like carrying a cup of coffee. The ‘predictive brain’ framework suggests that mastering these skills relies on predictive mechanisms, raising the question of how we deploy predictions for real-time control and coordination. This review highlights two research lines, showing that during the control of complex objects, people make the interaction with ‘tools’ predictable, and that, during dyadic coordination, people make their behavior predictable and legible for their partners. These studies demonstrate that to achieve sophisticated motor skills, we play ‘prediction tricks’: we select subspaces of predictable solutions and make sensorimotor interactions more predictable and legible by and for others. This synthesis underscores the critical role of predictability in optimizing control strategies across contexts. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for novel studies on the scope and limits of predictive mechanisms in motor control.