It takes the whole brain to make a cup of coffee: the neuropsychology of naturalistic actions involving technical devices

Both patient groups were about equally impaired on both naturalistic actions. Analysis of the experimental tests and their correlations to naturalistic actions suggested that different cognitive deficits caused failure in both patient groups, and that in LBD patients there were also different causes for failure on both naturalistic actions. The main difficulty of RBD patients seemed to reside in the demand to keep track of multi-step actions. In aphasic LBD patients difficulties with making coffee but not the cassette recorder were correlated with aphasia and defective retrieval of functional knowledge from semantic memory, whereas the cassette recorder correlated more strongly with a test probing solution of multi-step mechanical problems. Inference of function from structure which had been shown to be important for use of single familiar tools or tool/objects pairs [Goldenberg, G., Hagmann, S. (1998). AT Tool use and mechanical problem solving in apraxia. Neuropsychologia, 36, 581-589] appeared to play only a subordinate role for naturalistic actions involving technical devices.