The 15 most important cognitive skills

Different capacities and competencies that allow us to survive and adapt to our environment.

Human beings are entities whose nervous system allows us to carry out a large number of mental processes, which in turn allow us to have a large number of cognitive skills that we use adaptively in order to adapt and survive.

Of this enormous amount of abilities, some are more fundamental than others. Throughout this article we are going to refer to some of the most important cognitive abilities..

The most important cognitive skills

There are many cognitive skills that we have and that we use constantly to survive, mostly even unconsciously. Some of the fifteen most important are the following.

1. Attention

One of the most basic cognitive skills, attention allows us to focus our cognitive resources in such a way that we can operate and work with them. focus our cognitive resources in such a way that we can operate and work with them..

Within attention we can include abilities such as sustaining it, dividing it, moving it away from previously perceived stimulation to save cognitive resources. It also includes orientation responses to outgoing stimuli, allowing us to activate and react to possible threats.

2. Memory

Being able to encode, store and retrieve information is fundamental to generate learning experiences. generating learning experiences that allow us to that allow us to acquire a specific capacity or skill, to operate mentally with the information or even to generate memories that will become part of our history.

They include working memory (fundamental for any information processing), declarative (including episodic) and non-declarative, both short and long-term.

3. Self-awareness

Curiously little considered when we think about cognitive abilities, it is a fundamental capacity without which we could not have an identity..

It is the fact of being able to recognize oneself, to consider oneself as one's own being independent of the rest of the environment. It also allows us to be able to have and self-manage a personal history and to settle and make learning meaningful.

4. Reasoning

This ability has always been considered extremely important, to the point that in ancient times it was considered to be what it was considered to be what separated us from the rest of the animals..

The ability to reason allows us to draw conclusions from the observation of reality and act accordingly. We can include inductive reasoning (moving from particular cases to general axioms), deductive reasoning (deducing from the general how the behavior of particular cases will be) and hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

5. Motivation and goal setting

Motivation enables human beings to acquire and feel the energy and drive necessary to initiate and maintain a given course of action. initiate and maintain a given course of actionIt enables us to actively set and pursue our goals and objectives. The total absence of motivation could even cause us not to seek food or water for survival.

6. Associative ability

Being able to establish relationships between different events is a fundamental capacity not only for humans but for any type of living being with the capacity to learn. In fact, is the basis of any kind of learning.

7. Cognitive flexibility

If we always maintained our perspective and vision of things, we would not be able to learn without facing something contrary to our way of understanding reality. Being flexible allows us to be able to adapt to new conditions and modify our schemes according to what experience dictates.

It also allows us to be able to to assume different perspectives and to understand the motivations and thoughts of others.being of great help for socialization.

8. Problem solving

Deeply linked to the previous one, the ability to use the acquired knowledge, organize it and link it to the search for a solution to the problems we encounter.

9. Creativity and lateral thinking

Generating new strategies beyond the information and methods we have had available up to now has allowed human beings to evolve, for example, contributing to generate new technologies, techniques and procedures that allow us to reach our that allow us to reach our objectives or solve a problem in the most efficient way.

10. Perception

The ability to perceive is something we tend to take for granted, but the truth is that we can consider it one of the essential cognitive skills. It is the ability to transforming the signals coming from the senses into information with which our brain is able to work to perceive in a coordinated way, for example, the different information that makes up an image or what a person is saying to us.

11. Inhibition and behavior management

It is as important to do something as it is to be able not to do it, or to be able to do it at all. inhibit our already initiated behavioral patterns to face new information or to change strategies in case they are not being effective. It allows us to save time and effort, if not directly avoid dangers and be able to adapt to the environment.

12. Anticipation and planning

The past is important, but it is the ability to plan and anticipate results that allows us to start establishing plans and appropriate actions to achieve our objectives. It also allows us to assess risks and benefitsas well as the possible consequences of our actions.

13. Symbolization and interpretation

Something fundamental for the human being is the capacity to generate elements that allow us to represent an idea, as well as the capacity to value what a certain action or symbol implies. This allows us, for example, to communicate with our peers and socializeThis is peremptory for a gregarious species such as ours.

14. Language

Although more than a cognitive ability it could be considered an activity or a product of it, the truth is that language is a fundamental capacity when it comes to relating to others and transmitting information. We are not only talking about speech but also about but also reading, writing, gestures and expressions..

15. Metacognition

A cognitive ability of great relevance is the fact of being able to evaluate and think about one's own cognition. Metacognition allows us to take into account our abilities and knowledge, to analyze for example the type of information we lack to understand a situation or to optimize and improve our abilities.

Bibliographical references:

• Lycan, W.G., (ed.). (1999). Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 2nd Edition. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
• Stanovich, Keith (2009). What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press.
• Von Eckardt, Barbara (1996). What is cognitive science?. Massachusetts: MIT Press.