BEHAVIOR (H KIRSHNER, SECTION EDITOR) A Cognitive Overview of Limb Apraxia Angela Bartolo 1,2 & Heidi Stieglitz Ham 3,4 Published online: 27 June 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract Since the first studies on limb apraxia carried out by Hugo Liepmann more than a century ago, research interests focused on the way humans process manual gestures by assessing gesture production after patients suffered neurologic deficits. Recent reviews centered their attention on deficits in gesture imitation or processing object-related gestures, namely pantomimes and transitive gestures, thereby neglecting communicative/intransitive gestures. This review will attempt to reconcile limb apraxia in its entirety. To this end, the existing cognitive models of praxis processing that have been designed to account for the complexity of this dis- order will be taken into account, with an attempt to integrate in these models the latest findings in the studies of limb apraxia, in particular on meaningful gestures. Finally, this overview questions the very nature of limb apraxia when other cognitive deficits are observed. Keywords Limb apraxia . Intransitive gestures . Pantomimes . Transitive gestures . Social cognition . Working memory Introduction The Greek term praxis (πρ ξις) means Baction,^ therefore, Bapraxia,^ which is preceded by the privative ‘a’ means Bwithout action.^ This term has been coined by Steinthal in 1881 [1] to define deficits in action planning and execution as a consequence of a neurologic dysfunction. Limb apraxia is a specific form of apraxia affecting the upper limbs. Although limb apraxia has been defined in different ways, the more complete definition contains the following information. Limb apraxia is a deficit in the execution of purposive movements, followed by neurologic dysfunction, which can- not be explained by elementary motor or sensory defect, by task comprehension problems or by object-recognition defi- cits [2]. By analyzing the keywords of the above definition, we aim at tracing the profile of this deficit. This analysis will discuss new findings of recent studies that will link to the above def- inition using the cognitive models of limb apraxia. Execution of Purposive Movements in Neurologic Dysfunction Movements in limb apraxia encompass 2 main categories: meaningful and meaningless. Meaningless gestures are gestures that carry no meaning for the population concerned, for instance to Bput the fist under the chin.^ Although some exceptions are present in the literature [3], meaningless gestures are normally assessed in delayed or This article is part of the Topical Collection on Behavior * Angela Bartolo angela.bartolo@univ-lille3.fr Heidi Stieglitz Ham heidi@autismperth.com.au 1 Université Lille, CNRS, CHRU Lille, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France 2 Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France 3 Autism and Language Intervention-WA, Nedlands, Western Australia, Australia 4 Spectrum Fusion, BloomLab, St Catherine’ s College, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia Curr Neurol Neurosci Rep (2016) 16: 75 DOI 10.1007/s11910-016-0675-0