This chapter explores how cognitive ability and cultural practice intersect in the transfer of aerospace training technologies. At the heart of the study is the Perspective Taking Ability (PTA) test, a computerized measure of spatial cognition, used alongside ethnographic observation of technicians learning to drill composite panels through VR simulations. The findings reveal that PTA scores reflecting egocentric spatial skills, strongly predict performance outcomes such as drilling accuracy and control, particularly for novices. In contrast, allocentric tasks such as Array Rotation (AR) proved less relevant to the shop-floor realities of training. Yet numbers alone could not explain the story. Workers described learning not as solitary mental rotation, but as embodied apprenticeship: feeling pressure on the drill, synchronizing movements with colleagues, narrating tasks through stories and pausing in ways that signaled precision and respect. What appeared to outsiders as inefficiency was, in practice, a rhythm of trust and collective learning. The VR system, designed in a European context, initially struggled to account for these logics. Over time, however, the tool was re-coded. Its prompts softened, its interfaces redesigned and its sequences adapted to resonate with local learning cultures. The lesson is that technology transfer is never a one-way movement of machines or code. It is a process of translation—cognitive, cultural and relational. By combining experimental tests with ethnographic listening, this chapter shows how anthropotechnology helps reveal the hidden intelligence of work, turning apparent failures into insights for design.