• What are the thinking skills?

We explain what thinking skills are, their function, how they are classified and the characteristics of each one.

Thought deals with such broad tasks as memory, logic, and creativity.

What are the thinking skills?

Thought skills are the set of mental and psychic processes that allow us to manage, organize and process the information at all levels: from effectively linking what is received by our senses with the memory stored in our brain, until we improvise and imagine answers or explanations for the different situations that arise in real life.

These abilities or powers can have a very different level of complexity, depending on whether it is:

Basic skills, which link the inside and the outside through the information of the senses, allowing consciousness and meta-consciousness, that is, allowing us to be aware of the external stimulus and also of the process of perceiving it. In addition, basic skills support much more complex and demanding mental processes. These basic skills are:

• The observation, that is, the ability to obtain information from the environment through the application of the senses;
• The description, understood as the ability to evoke a specific reference in a third party through the use of a language (verbal or not);
• The comparison, which consists of the ability to relate two concrete or abstract references and obtain information from them;
• The relationship, also called association, which consists of the use of memory and imagination to find relationships between two or more referents;
• The classification, that is, the possibility of establishing types and differentiations between a set of referents, in order to allow the appearance of information referring to themselves.

Critical and analytical skills, on the other hand, are the mental processes that allow the management of information at levels of abstraction, correlation and creativity more complex and demanding. The forms of critical-analytical thinking are typical of systems of reasoning more specialized, such as scientific thought, the philosophical, the logical-formal, abstract-spatial or artistic creativity.