What is the Waiter in Action exercise?

An adult therapeutic game where users assume the waiter role, attending to changing restaurant orders to practice monitoring tasks, shifting attention, and adapting to changes, aimed at improving attention and impulse control.

What cognitive skills does Waiter in Action train?

Waiter in Action trains alternating, selective and sustained attention, plus inhibition, promoting focus shifting, concentration maintenance, and response suppression for impulse control.

How are difficulty levels structured in Waiter in Action?

The game has nine phases (phase 1 easiest, phase 9 hardest); users progress automatically based on performance, and professionals can also select phases manually.

Which customization parameters can professionals set?

Professionals can create custom phases and adjust parameters: number of diners and foods, alternation and variety, target stimuli count, stimuli amount and display time, scoring criteria, maximum errors, and general settings like exercise count, time limits, timer visibility and inactivity warnings.

In which languages is Waiter in Action available?

The activity is available in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese.

Is there a children's version of Waiter in Action?

Yes. The children's version, Animals Restaurant, has kids match each animal to its favorite food while preferences change, training attention and adaptability.

Attention and Impulse Control Exercise: Waiter in Action

We present a new exercise to promote attention and impulse control with adults that we are sure you will really like: Waiter in Action!

What does it consist of?

Users, who take on the role of waiters, must pay attention to the restaurant orders. They must serve each customer the ordered dish with great attention, since the dishes will be changing.

That is, they have to monitor a task constantly while shifting their focus of attention variably. In addition, they must adapt to changes in the order of the exercise.

All of this makes it a great exercise to promote attention and impulse control.

In the following video we show you an example of how to work with this exercise:

What does this activity train?

Waiter in Action trains:

Alternating attention,
selective attention,
sustained attention,
inhibition.

Ways to work with this game

Waiter in Action is a game and as such can be worked on in two ways:

Play by levels

The game is divided into phases. Phase 1 is the easiest and phase 9 is the most difficult.

The user will move up or down levels automatically according to their correct or incorrect responses. In addition, the professional can choose the phase manually.

2. Activity customization

In addition, customized phases can be created to adapt them to each person’s specific needs.

2.2 Parameters

In addition, we can limit some parameters of the activity such as:

The number of elements on the screen: number of diners and number of foods,
alternation,
variety of elements,
the number of target stimuli,
the scoring criteria: totals, errors and omissions,
amount of stimuli,
stimulus display time,
maximum errors.

Parameters of the Waiter in Action activity

2.1. General aspects

You can choose other general aspects such as:

The number of exercises,
the maximum time,
whether you want a visible timer for the activity or not,
whether to include an inactivity warning or not,
modify the performance instructions.

General aspects of the Waiter in Action activity — General aspects of the *Waiter in Action* activity.

Languages to work with this exercise to promote attention and impulse control

This activity can be used in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese.

Why did we create this activity?

This activity comes to life thanks to the suggestion of María Cristina Rosa, coordinator of the Neuropsychology service at ADEMO-CREN (Multiple Sclerosis Association of Huelva and its Center for Rehabilitation of Neurological Diseases). Rosa and her team often use with their users who have neurological sequelae Animals Restaurant, the children’s version of Waiter in Action, and they asked us to make an adult version.

Children’s version

As we just told you, Waiter in Action has a children’s version called Animals Restaurant. In this case, children must give each animal its favorite food. They must be very attentive, since, from time to time, the animals change their tastes.