Cutting Brussels sprouts: Collaboration involving persons with dementia

Lars-Christer Hydén

How people with dementia collaborate with other people is an area in need of more research and conceptualizations. Collaboration introduces a number of new possibilities and demands concerning cognitive and linguistic abilities and it is suggested that a theoretical framework that emphasize that cognitive resources are not exclusively individual, but are part of cognitive and communicative context. In this article focus is on joint activities and their collaborative organization is analyzed using an example involving persons with dementia working together with staff preparing a meal. The analysis shows that persons with dementia are able to collaborate in fairly advanced activities if they are supported in such a way that they can make use of the cognitive and linguistic resources of others, in particular cognitive functions having to do with planning and execution of actions. The organization of artifacts like kitchen tools can function as an external memory support. The results support a theoretical framework that help to understand what people can do together rather than focus on individual abilities. The results also indicate that is possible to learn how to organize collaboration involving persons with dementia by understanding how other persons abilities as well as artifacts can be used as external resources for support of cognitive and linguistic abilities.