Pattern recognition: grouping concrete thoughts

I was with my son at his occupational therapy session yesterday, and his leap in capability in a certain kind of performance stunned me. The recent context of his therapy has consisted of swinging to warm up his vestibular system, and then working through obstacle courses, where his ability to sequence through a series of linear events is stretched. His occupational therapist observed that as part of his dyspraxia, his short term attention and memory was compromised. He appeared to be in a fog sometimes, and if you asked him what he did in summer camp, or school that day, he couldn't tell you. Over the last month or so, he started doing obstacle courses, which would consist of 4 different events, such as:
1. Swinging in a swing, while throwing a ball against a wall
2. Jumping over a succession of foam pool noodles
3. Writing specific letters on a chalk/white board
4. Jumping off a 2 foot ledge, into a bank of pillows, and pushing against resistance, provided by the occupational therapist.

The first 5 or 6 sessions when he worked on an obstacle course like this, it was difficult to get him to remember one event to the next. He needed prompting each time to move on to the next step.
This last time, he swallowed up the whole sequence, and cycled through the series perfectly, 3 times. Out of curiosity, I asked him what he did at summer camp that day. He told me about 7 things they did in chronological order. He started to expand on how some of the activities of the day affected others. From what I had just witnessed, he went from processing his day with no linear ability, (knowing what happened, from one activity to the next) to understanding what he experienced multi-dimensionally!
A sudden insight flashed in my mind. Was his short term memory failure a lack of stickiness that most humans have for groupings? A classic example of this is how we remember things in groups of 3 and 4: Telephone numbers.
All of the sudden, he possessed these groupings, and was able to manipulate them, with facility.
Taking this further- his processing ability for understanding relationships was intact, but unacessable because his linear processing was undeveloped. His IT consultant fixed the short circuit.