To observe aroused attention, you need to be in a position where you can see the action of the pupils of the person's eyes. The actions of the pupils of their eyes focus on the external information, followed by moving to the left or the right. In general, moving to the left indicates mental processing in the right hemisphere, where sensorimotor information is located, most of the time. Moving to the right indicates mental processing in the left hemisphere, where language information is located, most of the time.

People with a cognitive disability pay attention to qualities of sensorimotor information, which is applied to causing effects with motor actions. The simplest mental process can be divided into a sequence of steps:

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.