Functional Memory Manual

Contents

This exercise is based on the Functional Memory game from LocuTour’s Attention & Memory: Volume II CD.

Menu

There are six groups of images, arranged in a roughly increasing order of difficulty.

Play

Study the graphic and recite the basic concepts in the image. Demonstrate comprehension by responding to the multiple choice questions.

The exercise scores correct and incorrect answers. Often the student focused on a detail of the image rather than seeing the big picture or recognized words or numbers in the answer and chose them because they were familiar.

Objective

The client will attend and utilize auditory and/or visual memory to process, remember, and use information presented at the single word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph levels.

Rationale

Independent practice with improving working memory stores may improve functional working memory, however some children and adults may have a more difficult time generalizing the strategies without direct practice. Therefore, we have included activities that encourage the dual processing tasks of memory and comprehension at the sentence and paragraph levels. There are multiple choice tasks as well as open-ended tasks. This allows the clinician flexibility in planning treatment sessions and provides an opportunity for receptive and expressive language treatment. The multiple choice format accesses recognition memory. Paragraph comprehension requires you to access both long term crystallized knowledge and the new information presented in the paragraph in order to answer the factual questions. Demonstration of comprehension requires information to be held in working memory, stored in long term memory, and then retrieved from long term memory storage. In addition to accessing knowledge, the questions for each paragraph require complex thinking skills. There is always a main idea question and there is at least one of the following: drawing conclusions, inferring, or predicting.

To retrieve and recall information many cognitive processes are activated. One must be able to initiate the desire to remember the information, sustain attention on the information to be retrieved and then switch to new pieces of information if the information retrieved is not relevant. One must be able to recognize relevant from irrelevant information and not get stuck and perseverate on irrelevant facts. Then a mental rehearsal of the retrieved information is required and verbal skills are employed to sequence the message, organize the important elements in a hierarchy of importance then apply it to the question that was originally asked. The reading comprehension paragraphs from Functional Paragraphs and the ability to locate relevant facts in the Functional Scanning tasks require the client to generalize the specific attention and memory skills

Credits

Created by Marna Scarry-Larkin, MA, CCC-SLP and Elizabeth Price, MA, CCC-SLP. Graphics by the programmers at LocuTour Multimedia. They were adapted for the web by Nancy Scarry.