To plan or not to plan: An examination of planning in everyday action

Abstract

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.