Visually Based Descriptions of an Everyday Action

A technique is described for analyzing everyday behaviors into units of action. The basis of this technique is both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, an argument is made that a basic unit level exists in everyday action and that this basic unit is characterized as a minimal transformation of the environment by the agent. In this study, we demonstrate that observers naive to this hypothesis about the nature of action nevertheless segmented actions they observed in the way predicted by the theory.