The goal of Catch of the Day is to improve visual scanning and discrimination. The client will visually scan a field from left to right and top to bottom to discriminate numbers from letters. The objective is to find the three numbers in the field of letters as quickly as possible.
The clinician can set the level of difficulty. Or an option can be set to let the app increase the visual complexity of the field as the client increases speed and accuracy.
Target Audience: Appropriate for children learning the difference between numbers and letters, and children and adult post-brain injury/stroke who could benefit from a visual search task that gradually increases in complexity.
Just $4.99 on the App Store.
Information for Professionals:
Letters and numbers are randomly displayed on the screen. The player scans the screen looking for the three numbers. Play starts with 20-25 targets and foils on the screen and uppercase letters. When the player successfully finds the numbers in less than 10 seconds per screen, the app moves them to lowercase letters and then both upper and lowercase letters. Level 2 has 40-50 targets and foils. Level 3 has 70-80 targets and foils. Level 4 has 100-115 targets and foils.
For visually impaired players, or players with severe disability, there is an option to increase the text size—which significantly reduces the number of items on the screen.
Options include the ability to show rewards after a certain number of screens have been viewed, select fonts of different visual complexity, and change the number of targets—up to seven. Results can be printed or emailed and are saved for download using iTunes.
This app was inspired by the Catch of the Day game on LocuTour’s High Level Attention CD.
Rationale: This task is intended for clients in Rancho levels VI and above. Stimuli are randomly presented in all quadrants of the visual field requiring ongoing sustained visual attention, visual search, and discrimination, again drawing upon Luria’s (1973) third functional unit, planning and verification of activity. This game is appropriate for children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, Mild Traumatic Brain Injury or Post Concussion Syndrome. The focus is to train sustained attention during a visual perceptual number/letter discrimination task.
