Memory - An American in Paris

How To Play

Get your guidebooks out because this game provides a splendid tour through eight of the greatest cities on earth, including Paris, Rome and London. You will need to memorize the names of some of the most famous monuments in your favorite city, together with their locations on a grid.

Cognitive Function Exercised

The game challenges your visual-spatial skills and your visual memory. The primary areas of the brain exercised in this game are the right parietal cortex and the right temporal cortex. Visual-spatial skills allow us to visually perceive objects and the spatial relationships among them. Spatial memory can be considered a subcategory of visual memory because it relies on a cognitive or mental map whereby an individual can acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and characteristics in one's spatial environment.

These are the skills that enable us to mentally manipulate and rotate information in space by taking different perspectives. These skills also allow us to retrace our way across a busy city because we have a visual map in our memory from the last time we made the trip. Visual-spatial abilities include a wide variety of individual skills that include the recognition of brightness and darkness, identification of complex intersecting angles and curves, and the recognition of faces from the shape of eyes, noses, mouths and hair.

Benefits to Daily Life

Good visual-spatial skills are needed to orient yourself in a neighborhood, to retrace your steps through a crowd, to remember landmarks, and also to be able to recognize that you are in an unfamiliar environment.