Our Areas of Specialization

HOME AND COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

OTOL Rx Cognitive Rehab Specialists provides home and community therapy to people with cognitive difficulties. These problems may be due to a brain injury, neurological illness, or neurodevelopmental condition. Our program concentrates on applying therapy skills in meaningful situations with each client at the focal point of their program. We are available to meet with clients in surroundings that count the most–in their homes and their communities. Community locations include the local grocery store, shopping center, hiking trail, public transportation route, and volunteer/work setting.

Our clients may experience cognitive difficulties in one or more categories of behavior. These include memory, reasoning and problem-solving, visual perception, impulse control and self regulation, attention, receptive and expressive language, social-communication skills, and abstract thinking. Executive functioning skills, also known as “the orchestra conductor,” is another area of cognitive functioning commonly addressed by our experienced team. These skills consist of a variety of cognitive processes working together in an organized fashion. Many if not all aspects of functional, everyday behavior are impacted by executive functioning skills. The building block skills for executive control include:

  • Planning: The ability to set a realistic goal and to create steps to attain the goal
  • Initiation: The ability to get started
  • Inhibition: The ability to stop oneself from carrying out a well-practiced and “ready” response when that response is not adaptive to the present situation; also involves the ability to shift attention or cognitive set to a new stimulus and disregarding or “placing in the background” the previous stimulus for the current situation
  • Attention to and appropriate response to feedback: The ability to focus on performance feedback from others and integrate useful information into subsequent behavior
  • Cognitive flexibility: The ability to shift attention focus from one stimulus to another or from one idea to another, without being stuck on prior thoughts and actions
  • Problem-solving and self-correction: The ability to recognize that an ineffective action is being carried out when engaged in a familiar or novel activity; this is followed by stopping prior to completion, reevaluating what actions have taken place, formulating or revising the plan to include behavioral corrections/adaptations, and then implementing these corrections to better achieve the desired outcome

MANAGEMENT OF STUDENTS WITH DIFFICULTIES IN LANGUAGE-LEARNING AND COGNITIVE-COMMUNICATION-SOCIAL SKILLS

OTOL Rx Cognitive Rehab Specialists is highly recognized for our work with students presenting with challenges in:

  • Expressive language skills: The ability to express oneself in verbal and written communication through words, sentences, and longer communications (with a smooth flow of ideas, adequate content-detail inclusion, and clear connection of thoughts)
  • Receptive language skills: The ability to process and understand auditory information and written material
  • Social-communication skills: The knowledge about the social rules for handling a conversation with others (such as sharing the speaking time, selecting speaking topics of mutual interest, minimizing interruptions, recognizing and considering someone else’s perspective) and the ability to apply these rules when having conversations in different situations; the ability to manage conversational interactions as the listener in different situations with different people (such as paying attention, maintaining eye contact, letting the other person know you may not or did not understand what was said) and to detect meaning from facial expressions, body posture, and tone of voice
  • Comprehending inferences and use of figurative language: The ability to determine the deeper meaning that is non-literal or not explicitly stated when talking with others or reading information
  • Indirect skill competencies for school success: The use of effective skills in attention, organization, time management, and executive functioning during classroom participation and or when completing assigned schoolwork