Everyday activities are necessary for independent and productive living, and errors in everyday tasks are associated with a multitude of negative consequences, from increasing stress and frustration to serious safety concerns. Current rehabilitation strategies for improving everyday functioning focus on improving deliberate planning of everyday tasks, however many fundamental questions remain regarding everyday action planning. Few studies have examined both plan formulation and plan execution during everyday task performance, included multiple traditional neuropsychological planning measures, and evaluated competing neurocognitive models of planning in one study. This study addressed several gaps in the literature by examining the extent to which individuals planned before beginning an everyday task and whether planning facilitated performance. Additionally, the study was designed to identify optimal measures of planning abilities and the neurocognitive processes that are crucial for planning skills. A sample of 92 healthy participants completed complex everyday tasks (2x3 Multi-Level Action Test; Buxbaum et al., 1998; Schwartz et al., 1998) as well as a neuropsychological battery consisting of traditional neuropsychological tests of planning (e.g., Tower Test; Delis et al., 2001) and executive functioning (e.g., Haylings Test; Burgess & Shallice, 1997), episodic memory (e.g., WAIS- IV Logical Memory; Wechsler, 2009a), and working memory (e.g., Automated Symmetry Span; Barch et al., 2009). Contrary to hypotheses, deliberate planning prior to a task did not improve performance, traditional neuropsychological measures were not significantly related to naturalistic planning variables, and neither executive functions nor episodic memory were strongly associated with planning skills. The results suggest that investigators must use caution when selecting planning variables for research and when drawing conclusions about everyday functioning from traditional neuropsychological planning measures. Further research is also needed to expand current neurocognitive models of planning to account for performance on complex everyday tasks. / Psychology / Accompanied by one .pdf file: Appendix.

Cognitive functioning, particularly executive functioning, is a strong predictor of everyday action impairments in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear if remediating cognitive deficits can lead to meaningful gains in adaptive functioning. Approaches that attempt to improve everyday action performance through bypassing or compensating for cognitive deficits are promising ways to address functional impairments. This study examined whether standardized environmental interventions can compensate for cognitive difficulties and improve action performance in schizophrenia. Forty two individuals were administered two versions of the Naturalistic Action Test (NAT)--a standard version (ST-NAT), and a user-centered version (UC-NAT) that incorporated interventions aimed at streamlining action performance. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated enhanced performance on the UC-NAT, demonstrating the beneficial effects of environmental interventions on everyday action. Results indicated that the interventions likely exerted their effect through compensating for global cognitive dysfunction. Additionally, the NAT's reliability and validity for schizophrenia populations, as well as the UC-NAT's utility for addressing the cognitive impairments of a variety of neurological populations were examined. / Psychology

The diminished ability to perform everyday tasks is a salient problem for individuals diagnosed with a dementia. Recent research suggest that dementia patients detect significantly fewer action errors than age-matched controls; however, very little is known about the derivation of their error monitoring difficulties. The primary aims of my dissertation were to evaluate a novel, task training action intervention (TT-NAT) designed to increase error monitoring in dementia patients, and to pinpoint the relation between error monitoring and neuropsychological processes in participants who receive the task training intervention. Results indicated that dementia participants in the TT-NAT condition produced fewer total errors and detected significantly more of their errors than individuals in the Standard condition (z = 3.0 and t = 3.36, respectively; p < . 05). Error detection in the TT-NAT condition was strongly related to the language/semantic knowledge composite index only (r = .57, p = .00), whereas it was moderately related to both the language and executive composite indices in the Standard condition. No differences in error correction rates were noted, although patients in all groups corrected the majority of errors detected. The findings suggest that the TT-NAT may be a promising intervention for error monitoring deficits in dementia patients, and have considerable implications for neuropsychological rehabilitation. / Psychology