The reduction in information that arouses their attention creates a different perspective. Their sense of identity and their memories of the past are narrowed down to the information that arouses their attention. Those memories are probably stored in the same region of the cortex. Their sense of other people and what they are doing is connected to the information that arouses their attention too. Their senses of space, direction and time have been woven into the methods for selecting and presenting actions and activities.

The reductions in the physiological operations of the brain have an effect on the person's abilities to:

• pay attention to information,
• access procedural and long-term memories,
• retain information in working memory,
• learn and remember new information,
• talk,
• coordinate their gross, fine motor and bilateral movements,
• understand what they read,
• write or text a message, and
• comprehend what money is.

All these reductions reduce their capacity to manage their own affairs.

Neurophysiology has provided three processes that form a unit of functional abilities. The processes that unite ability to function are:

A person's cognitive ability can be defined as their global ability to function, which is: everything the person says and does, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Allen Cognitive Disability Model (ACDM) is a conceptual framework for producing actions and activities that people with cognitive disabilities can feel good about doing now.

The focus of the ACDM is on the sensorimotor information that does arouse attention because those cognitive abilities can be connected to actions and activities that a person with a cognitive disability can do.