Memory - Restaurant

How To Play

Have you ever been impressed with waiters in a restaurant? Having taken an order they can remember who gets what food at serving time – sometimes after the guests have shuffled seats. Here you get to play the role of the waiter. Each diner will order a drink, a main dish, a side dish and a dessert. Then, following an intentional (but optional) distraction task related to calorie content in certain foods, it will be up to you to remember the orders of each diner. Is your memory as good as a waiter's? Play and see!

Cognitive Function Exercised

Memory is the retention of information over time, after the target item is no longer available. There are two aspects of memory involved in this game: visual memory and working memory. Visual memory involves being able to take in information that is presented visually, to process and store it in your mind, and then recall a representation of what you have seen. These skills of focusing, processing, storing, and recalling are largely functions of the brain's prefrontal cortex. However, owing to the complexity involved in working memory, when the brain processes a task like this, the work is distributed over a number of cortical areas and involves circuits with the frontal cortex, the parietal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Moreover, because this game involves verbal information (customers' orders) and spatial information (their positions around the table), both the left and right brain hemispheres are activated.

Benefits to Daily Life

Intact visual memory is essential in everyday life. Even if you're not a waiter, you need good visual memory in order to remember people's faces, associate faces with names, memorize notes from school or work, or retrace your steps through town. Further, most of the mental problem-solving you perform in order to get through the day involves "working memory." It acts somewhat like the RAM in your computer: you temporarily store the information necessary to accomplish the task at hand, but you don't necessarily commit it to permanent longer-term memory.