In this work, we perform an extensive statistical evaluation for learning and recognition of object manipulation actions. We concentrate on single arm/hand actions but study the problem of modeling and dimensionality reduction for cases where actions are very similar to each other in terms of arm motions. For this purpose, we evaluate a linear and a nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques: Principal Component Analysis and Spatio-Temporal Isomap. Classification of query sequences is based on different variants of Nearest Neighbor classification. We thoroughly describe and evaluate different parameters that affect the modeling strategies and perform the evaluation with a training set of 20 people.