We explain what cognitive abilities and their intellectual abilities are. Also, the types of cognitive skills and examples.
What are cognitive skills?
It is known as cognitive abilities or cognitive abilities to aptitudes of human being related to the processing of information, that is, those that involve the use of the memory, attention, perception, the creativity and abstract or analog thinking.
The thought human is the result of a complex and abstract series of processes, ranging from the capture of certain stimuli, their interpretation, their storage in the memory and its translation into a system of values and concepts from which a response will emerge later.
Cognitive abilities have a lot to do with notions of intelligence, of learning and experience, thanks to which an individual can grow cognitively and learn to perform complex tasks or to foresee future situations in relation to what has been experienced.
Thus, this type of skills corresponds to a set of specific intellectual capacities, which a person uses more or less throughout the different situations of their life. life, such as:
- Forecast. The ability to evaluate the consequences or implications of an action before taking it, thus being able to desist from it if said consequences were inconvenient or, perhaps, to stop them having seen them coming beforehand. This capacity is key for the survival of the individual and for their integration into the society.
- Planning. The ability to foresee a series of consequences in the future from the actions taken and therefore trace goals Y objectives arising from said actions. It is the ability to choose consequences and achieve future purposes.
- Evaluation. The ability to individually judge the convenience or danger of an action, or to know how close or not one is to the desired goal, in short, to be aware of where one is and correct the behavior to reach the desired point or avoid the unwanted.
- Innovation. The ability to find alternatives or new paths towards the desired goals, based on past and memorized experiences, taking into consideration the understanding of the world that one possesses. This ability is also key for the evolution of abstract thinking and avoiding the repetition of previous formulas, however successful they may have been.
It is a central theme in the study of human life, since our cognitive abilities were precisely those that guaranteed the survival of the species from its early origins and its evolution over two million years (more or less) until reaching the level of intellectual, technical and scientific development that we know today.
Types of cognitive skills
Broadly speaking, there are two types of cognitive abilities:
- Cognitive habilyties. They allow the elaboration of the knowledge, operating directly on the information collected by the senses. They usually consist of the following skills:
- Attention. Ability to capture details and concentration or focus.
- Understanding. Ability to translate what is captured to a language own, internal elaboration of what is perceived, classification of reality, etc.
- Elaboration. Formation of a thought own as a response to what is perceived, that is, formulation of a response.
- Recovery. Memorization of what was experienced to serve as a basis for future identical or similar experiences, being able to recover what was learned even without being in the presence of the stimulus in question.
- Metacognitive skills. Those whose object is not perceived reality, but the cognitive processes themselves, thus allowing the ability to think about the way one thinks, so to speak. Thus, these skills allow the control, explanation and transmission of lived knowledge, as well as the formulation of a useful language for this and other complex systems of representation of ideas.
Examples of cognitive skills
Logical reasoning is part of the deductive ability.
Some cognitive abilities can be the following:
- Linguistic ability. The talent in the use of language and representation systems through sound articulated or its physical transcription (writing). This includes:syntax, lexicon, pragmatic, etc.
- Capacity of attention. The possibility of perceiving more than what others perceive or of being much more aware of small changes in the environment. This includes: concentration, selective attention, speed of response, etc.
- Capacity for abstraction. The talent to construct or interpret complex systems of signs or mental projections, and translate them into concrete operations. For example: spatial orientation, imagination, arithmetic reasoning, etc.
- Deductive capacity. The ability to deduce or infer events from portions of the total information, to imaginatively complete what is perceived or to intuit situations. For example: logical reasoning, categorization, similarities and differences, formal logic, intuitive reasoning, etc.