ABSTRACT
The topic of this chapter is naturalistic action, by which we mean movement in the service of commonplace, practical goals like food preparation and consumption. Naturalistic action involves sequences of movements that are well established through practice, for example, cutting food with fork and knife, spearing food onto the fork, and bringing the fork to the mouth. As such, it represents a class of skilled action. It is also movement carried out with and upon objects 1 , and hence it utilises knowledge about the function and usage of objects (e.g. the spearing function of the fork). Finally, since naturalistic action is organised by goal hierarchies that structure behaviour over reasonably long time frames, it requires planning, attention, and working memory—functions served, at least in part, by the frontal lobes. Given these attributes, it is somewhat surprising that naturalistic action and naturalistic action disorders do not feature prominently in neuropsychological theories of skilled action, conceptual (semantic) memory, or frontal lobe functions. 2
