Did you know that your mind is capable of predicting your future mood?
The definition of cognitive skills is a set of mental abilities or faculties that allow us to process everything that surrounds us and thus be able to form an appropriate response to our environment. You already know some mental faculties: intelligence, memory, attention or understanding. However, your mind has many secrets that will surprise you.
If you want to discover the 20 cognitive skills that you didn’t know you had, keep reading this interesting article from Psychology-Online, in it you will find What are they a person’s abilities, guys cognitive skills and examples of cognitive skills. Let’s address all the cognitive processes you can imagine, from the most common to the most surprising in order to develop your full potential.
As we mentioned initially, cognitive skills are those mental faculties that help us understand the world around us and to process the stimuli collected by the senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. According to many experts, the set of all cognitive abilities makes up intelligence or intellectual capacity.
Let’s take an example of cognitive skill: memory. Thanks to this cognitive ability we can retain stimuli (a movie that we see and hear) and then be able to process it or save it in our memories.
The human being has a multitude of skills and mental faculties through which he can know and perceive the world through the senses. These skills can be classified into:
Basic cognitive skills
Cognitive skills are those that work directly on the information collected by the senses, that is, they are the first to process information from outsidethe basic cognitive skills are the following:
- Memory
- Perception
- Attention
- Comprehension
- Language
Higher cognitive skills
These are the product of the combination of the first. What are higher cognitive abilities? The following:
- Metacognition
- Motivation
- Emotion
- Learning
- Reasoning
Below we present a list of 20 cognitive abilities:
1. Memorization
Memory is that cognitive ability that allows us Store information In order to later understand it or develop a structured thought, we differentiate between short-term and long-term memory. Both processing are cognitive abilities that operate directly on stimuli. In this article you will find more information about the .
2. Perception
Perception is the primary cognitive faculty, the most basic one since, thanks to it, our brain organizes and processes information. information from our senses.
3. Attention
Attention is that cognitive capacity with which we can direct our thinking towards a specific stimulus or action (for example, when we maintain attention in class or in a work meeting). In this article we see the .
4. Understanding
Understanding is a mental skill that helps us understand what is perceived and generate ideas through observation of the environment and the phenomena that occur in it. This is one of the most important basic cognitive skills.
5. Language
One of the mental abilities that most differentiates us from other living beings is the complicated language system that we have. This skill is a system of both vocal and written signs that facilitates the communication process among us.
6. Metacognition
This cognitive ability is also known as the ability to “notice our own thoughts or think about what we are thinking.” Here you will find .
7. Motivation
Motivation is the cognitive skill of directing our energy towards a specific goal. The motivation can be or .
8. Emotion
Emotion is the cognitive ability to express our feelings through a psychological sensation. In this article you will find.
9. Learning
In combination with memory and perception, we can generate thoughts that allow us to continue improving and adapting our behavior to the environment that surrounds us. Here you can read the interesting one.
10. Reasoning
It is the cognitive ability that allows us to draw conclusions through perception and understanding.
11. Affective prediction
Also know as affective forecast a surprising cognitive ability with which our brain makes a prediction of our future mood.
12. Lateral thinking
This mental technique is a great help since it allows us to look for alternatives to what would be the simplest or “logical” solution. For example, a person with developed lateral thinking can see a conflict from different perspectives and solve it in a new and ingenious way.
13. Emotional intelligence
Probably a skill you already knew. However, did you know that there are neurons in our brain that help us understand the emotional states of others? They are known as.
14. Planning
This mental faculty is the one that designs the steps we are going to take and the decisions we are going to make in a given period of time.
15. Self-regulation
Closely linked to planning, this cognitive skill is based on following each planned step and maintaining both motivation and attention to achieve the established objective. It also serves to power manage our emotions and produce an appropriate response to each situation.
16. Evaluation
This mental capacity is one that allows us evaluate any phenomenon, feeling or thought, whether your own or someone else’s. We should not confuse evaluation with judgment since the former is not linked to any social or moral factor.
17. Reorganization
We define reorganization as the act of modifying or changing the errors made until we can achieve our objective, an essential cognitive competence to adapt our behavior.
18. Anticipation
It is the cognitive skill that helps us get ahead of new learning. Anticipation foresees the steps we are going to take and can predict the results.
19. Creative capacity
Also known as creativity, this cognitive ability is what allows us to reproduce in our own way a feeling, thought and even something that our senses have captured. For example, we bring out our creative capacity when we write a poem or paint a painting. Discover here the.
20. Abstraction capacity
We all know imagination and can define it, but did you know that imagination is only one of the many factors that influence the capacity for abstraction? This cognitive ability is defined as the talent or ability to project in our mind all kinds of ideas, thoughts and concepts that cannot be transported to reality.
If you want to know other types of skills, in this article you will find.