Lesson 4

Job Site Training - slide 10

Compensatory Memory Strategies
Imagery
Mneumonics
Number Grouping
Memory Notebook
Assignment Board
Verbal Rehearsal - Self-Instruction
Location and Place Markers

Let’s take a few minutes to also talk about some compensatory memory strategies. You may be familiar with a number of these strategies once I begin talking about them. I know I use a number of them myself to assist me in remembering different things that I am trying to accomplish. The first item on our list is imagery, the loose definition of which is the process of using mental pictures or images to recall the steps in completing a task.

For example, you might visualize how you completed a task in the past to assist you in completing a task in the present. The customer might visualize himself using a particular route to go to work in order to get there without becoming lost. I personally have a very poor sense of direction so the idea of visualizing a route or imagining myself following a route to get to some location is very familiar to me.

When I am driving around town here in Richmond, if I get confused about where I am and can’t remember how to get from point A to point B, I will visualize where I am and then see myself driving the route to get to where I want to be. This is a very effective strategy for someone who has the ability to imagine or visualize a particular task. In particular, maybe one of your customers with a brain injury or a chronic mental illness could identify with this visualization or imagery strategy.

The next item on your list is mnemonics, which imposes an organization structure on information to allow you to recall several elements. AS an example, have you ever made up a silly sentence so that you could remember something like, “Suzy sell seashells by the seashore”, and the first letter of every word stands for something that you need to do? I know when I was taking anatomy in college and trying to remember certain body parts, or certain ways that things fit together, I would make up these silly sentences and the first letter of every word would key me when I took the test to remember key pieces of information. A person who is trying to remember a job duty sequence may use this strategy to remember the order of his/her tasks.

The next idea is number grouping. I don’t know about you, but I have horrible auditory recall for numbers. If I were to have someone say to me 1, 5, 10, 15, 20 I would have a horrible time and in fact I could not just repeat to you the numbers that I said out loud. Number grouping requires us to recall numbers by perceptually reorganizing them into fewer elements. So let’s say that an individual is doing data entry and the four numbers that need to be entered are 1,7,2, and 5. Instead of listing the numbers individual, the person would recall the numbers by saying 17, 25. Which is an easier organization of remembering the numbers for data entry.

The next item is a memory notebook that we have sort of danced around in many ways, and can be implied to the example from last slide with the vet assistant. A memory notebook is just maintaining written cues systematically in a log so that the customer can keep up with things that have been done or need to be accomplished. This could be a day planner, or it could be done through a dictation fashion, or any other way that the individual may be successful.
The next to the last item on the list is verbal rehearsal. Obviously with verbal rehearsal or self-instruction the person would need to be in an environment where he/she could talk out loud. Essentially verbal rehearsal is just repeating key information to facilitate memory recall. Eventually a person may learn to internalize this strategy by repeating in their mind until there is no need to speak out loud.

The last item on this slide is location and place markers. We have already talked about this in the context of the restroom example where we used the concept of the work supplies as a place marker when the individual was leaning the restroom. I will use one more example before I leave the idea of compensatory memory strategies and that might be the individual who is doing inventory in a large warehouse who sometimes gets called off task to fill an order. The individual has trouble remembering where he left off his inventory, so he would use a place marker to cue himself to come back to that area. That place marker might be a bandanna that he ties on the shelf or some other cue or marker that he can see quickly in scanning the work environment. Again, I’m sure you could individualize these ideas to work for people that you are working with in their job sites.