Cognitive Disability

Cognitive abilities include the ability to create and execute a plan.

Cognitive impairments include inattention, distractibility, loss of concentration, impaired judgment, conceptualisation, perception, indecision, memory problems, and poor problem-solving skills.

This may result from a range of conditions such as mental retardation, autism, brain injury, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and old age.

Students in DCSD who have disabilities to such an extent that they impact their ability to learn are served within their home/neighborhood school under the direction of their 504 or IEP plan.

Learning difficulties can also affect a variety of memory, perception, problem-solving and conceptualisation skills. Learning difficulties include reading problems such as dyslexia, computational, reasoning and organisational deficits and non-verbal learning disorders. These are sometimes also associated with Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity.

A person with a cognitive disability has greater difficulty with one or more types of mental tasks than the average person. Most cognitive disabilities have some sort of basis in the biology or physiology of the individual. The connection between a person's biology and mental processes is most obvious in the case of traumatic brain injury and genetic disorders, but even the more subtle cognitive disabilities often have a basis in the structure or chemistry of the brain.

A person with profound cognitive disabilities will need assistance with nearly every aspect of daily living. Someone with a minor learning disability may be able to function adequately despite the disability, perhaps even to the extent that the disability is never discovered or diagnosed. There is a wide variance among the mental capabilities of those with cognitive disabilities.

Functional & Clinical

Clinical diagnoses of cognitive disabilities may include:

• Autism
• Down Syndrome
• Traumatic brain injury (TBI)
• and even dementia

Less severe cognitive conditions include attention deficit disorder (ADD), dyslexia (difficulty reading), dyscalculia (difficulty with math), and learning disabilities in general.

Functional disabilities ignore the medical or behavioral causes of the disability and instead focus on the resulting abilities and challenges. Some of the main categories of functional cognitive disabilities include deficits or difficulties with:

• Memory
• Problem-solving
• Attention
• Reading, linguistic, and verbal comprehension
• Math comprehension
• Visual comprehension

Memory
Memory refers to the ability to recall what one has learned over time. A common model for explaining memory involves the concepts of working (i.e., immediate) memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Meaningful information is typically moved up the chain from immediate to short-term into long-term memory stores. Some individuals with cognitive disabilities have difficulties with one, two, or all three of these memory types. The more meaningful content is to the needs of the user, the greater the chances that it will be moved into functional memory storage in the brain.

Visual Comprehension
Some students have difficulties processing visual information. In many ways, this is the opposite of the problem experienced by people with reading and verbal processing difficulties. Individuals with visual comprehension difficulties may not recognize objects for what they are. They may recognize the fact that there are objects on a page, but may not be able to identify the objects. For example, they may not realize that a photograph of a person is a representation of a person, though they can plainly see the photograph itself (as an object) on the page.

For these people, a moving, talking person in a video may be easier to identify and mentally process than a static image of a person in a photograph. Video and multimedia, accompanied with narration, may be the best way to communicate to these individuals.