The cognitive neuropsychology of everyday action and planning

Today's cognitive neuropsychology of everyday action had its inception in studies of ADS-action disorganisation syndrome-that were inspired by the Norman-Shallice theory of controlled and automatic action selection. It is now known that errors in everyday action and planning are commonplace with many types of brain damage, and that effects associated with gradations in severity, and with the presence of distractor objects, are surprisingly uniform across clinically diverse patient samples. The Norman-Shallice model of automatic action selection, having been implemented for two everyday tasks, has had some success in explaining these facts. This paper reviews the patient and modelling studies and discusses some unanswered questions and methodological challenges that confront future research in this area.