Cognitive stimulation for children in clinical and academic settings

Centro Otaduy Educación y Salud explains cognitive stimulation for children in clinical and academic settings.

Centro Otaduy Educación y Salud is an education and health center that provides comprehensive, multidisciplinary services in learning and health, seeing learning as an inherent part of a child’s development.

For this reason, our team of specialized professionals, which includes speech-language pathologists, educators, neuropsychologists, clinical and school psychologists in different specialties, and teachers, is led by Dr. Otaduy, a pioneer of this method based on understanding learning together with the child’s needs at each developmental milestone.

Incorporating the child’s growth into the concept of learning led our method to look for a validated, recognized clinical cognitive stimulation system, such as NeuronUP.

We know that cognitive stimulation has its origins in the concepts of cognitive rehabilitation and neuropsychological rehabilitation, but in our case, cognitive stimulation for children goes much further.

Cognitive stimulation for children

The brain is fundamentally plastic and can change its structure and function under the right conditions; it has the ability to renew or rewire its neural circuits. That’s why children WITH OR WITHOUT neurodevelopmental disorders who work with cognitive stimulation are able to learn and develop cognitive functions that are not yet established.

The more stimulation they receive, the more complete their neurological organization and the more their abilities and skills improve.

Goals of cognitive stimulation for children

Our main goals when working with cognitive stimulation are to:

• Activate, stimulate, and train certain cognitive abilities (perceptual reasoning, verbal comprehension, working memory, and processing speed) in an appropriate, systematic way to turn them into a skill, a habit, and/or an ability.
• Develop mental abilities, improve and optimize their functioning, and rehabilitate and recover the functions and abilities with the greatest cognitive deficits, especially sustained attention, working memory, and processing speed.

Thanks to NeuronUP, we can not only train and improve cognitive abilities, but also get ongoing feedback on each child’s development and progress in the areas worked on. It can also serve as training for students of any age who want to improve their academic performance.

Within each student’s individual plan, our work involves adapting and personalizing the different cognitive stimulation exercises to individual needs.

Cognitive stimulation for children with learning difficulties

For example, with students who do have learning difficulties, we work on cognitive skills related to inhibition, adapting programs for:

1. Focused and selective, divided and sustained attention, as well as attention span, orientation, flexibility, and inhibition;
2. immediate memory and working, episodic, semantic, procedural, and prospective memory;
3. language (phonology, lexical semantics, syntax, discourse, pragmatics);
4. reasoning (categorization, abstracting similarities and differences, analogical relationships, and logical reasoning);
5. constructional, ideational, and ideomotor praxis;
6. executive functions (organization, planning, flexibility, and initiative);
7. perception (perceptual recognition and discrimination, visuospatial functions, and body schema);
8. spatial and temporal orientation (place, time, person).

5 Cognitive Stimulation Activities for Kids You Should Know

Our experience with NeuronUP

We have been doing this cognitive stimulation with NeuronUP since 2017.

We chose this program over the other options mainly for its great versatility and because it allows us to personalize each individual plan, adapting the activities for each user.

We can select the intervention areas most needed in each case, in a fun, playful way, and compare each student’s results and progress:

Assessment

• Initial,
• formative,
• final.

Student motivation

Because we can select the activities that best suit each child, we keep students motivated, since the content is presented in a very visual way that captures their attention.

This is a new concept of cognitive stimulation, not only in its clinical form but also as a way to support optimal learning development.

The importance of training cognitive development

Just as physical exercise is necessary for children and young people at different stages of development to improve their physical and mental health, cognitive stimulation is a useful and necessary way to maintain intellectual skills and abilities throughout cognitive development. It helps prevent intellectual slumps during growth spurts, stressful times, exam periods, and so on.

NeuronUP gives us the unbeatable ability to adapt to each child as a unique individual.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our experience with NeuronUP over these two years has been more than satisfactory, and we have been able to objectively confirm its effectiveness in the cognitive areas treated, in both clinical and academic settings, in improving school performance.

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“This article has been translated. Link to the original article in Spanish:”
La estimulación cognitiva para niños en el ámbito clínico y académico