The cognitively disabled person has thoughts and feelings that are the basis for making choices. When their attention is aroused, they may invest all of their available energy by forming cause and effect connections between the cues and their behavior.

The Allen Cognitive Level Screen, 6^th Edition (ACLS-6) is an assessment and learning tool designed to observe the effects caused by aroused attention in several actions or activities. The prior ACLS editions were designed to teach therapists how to observe and score behavior in three leather lacing stitches.

When you get a referral, read the person's medical records. The following information is related to the ability to function:

When you start working with a person a standardized evaluation of activity performance helps to establish an objective perspective which is why the Allen Cognitive Level Screen (ACLS) test was created and has been revised so many times. Before you plunge into administering a test learn what you can about the person's medical condition as it affects their past current and future ability to function.

This section aims to expand the way everyone in occupational therapy thinks about actions and activities. Normally we think about the content, e.g. work, rest, and play, or self-care, exercises, housekeeping, cooking, crafts, etc. The content is associated with customary supplies and behaviors. The content, supplies and behaviors will be added to, but by the information they each contain, which pulls them all together. The same information that arouses the person's attention can be found in the content and supplies required to do actions and activities.

The purpose of this discussion is to alert you to common difficulties when comparisons are made between the ACLs and other scales. There are rules for qualifying for each type and rules about the application of the scores:

The Allen Cognitive Levels is an ordinal scale that measures the type of sensorimotor information that arouses attention. An ordinal scale is also a hierarchical scale, which means that the scale measures both abilities and disabilities simultaneously.

The Allen Cognitive Levels scale has been divided into three different sections to serve different purposes:

The Allen Cognitive Levels is a categorization of the quality of information that arouses attention and guides what the person does and says, from a coma to normal adulthood and can be used to describe a person's global ability to function.

The age of onset of a cognitive disability seems to effect the person with either getting stuck with an obsolete identity or having a better identity.

People who have a history of functioning normally will probably continue to believe that they still can. Lots of evidence to the contrary rarely affects their sense of self. A few changes in their methods of doing activities may be negotiated.

An obsolete identity is a memory of how the person functioned before the onset of a cognitive disability. Learning and memory since the onset of a cognitive disability are reduced, making an update of the identity impossible. They may be aware of the mistakes they make, may not remember the frequency of their mistakes and rarely understand the implications of potential disasters. Insufficient cognitive abilities to pay attention to abstract information causes a lack of awareness of the need to adjust their evaluation of what they can and cannot do or say now.