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 abilities that we use adaptively in order to adapt and survive.
Of this enormous amount of capabilities, some are more fundamental than others. Throughout this article We are going to refer to some of the most important cognitive skills.
There are many cognitive skills that we have and that we constantly use to survive, most of them even unconsciously. Some of the fifteen most important are the following.
1. Attention
One of the most basic cognitive skills, attention allows us focus our cognitive resources in such a way that we can operate and work with them.
Within attention we can include capacities such as holding it, dividing it, moving it away from previously perceived stimulation to save cognitive resources. Orientation responses towards salient stimuli are also included, allowing us to activate and react to possible threats.
2. Memory
Being able to encode, process and recover information is essential in order to generate learning experiences that allow us to acquire a specific capacity or skill to operate mentally with information or even generate memories that will be part of our history.
They include working memory (fundamental for any information processing), declarative memory (including episodic memory), and non-declarative memory, 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 about being able to recognize oneself, to consider oneself as one’s own being independent of the rest of one’s environment. It also allows us to be able to have and self-manage a personal history and establish and make learning meaningful.
4. Reasoning
This ability has always been considered extremely important, to the point that in the past It was considered to be what separated us from the rest of the animals.
The ability to reason allows us to draw conclusions from observing reality and act accordingly. We can include inductive reasoning (going from particular cases to general axioms), deductive reasoning (deducing from the general what the behavior of particular cases will be like) and hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
5. Motivation and goal setting
Motivation allows the human being to acquire and feel the energy and drive necessary to initiate and maintain a given course of action, allowing us to actively set and pursue our goals and objectives. The total absence of motivation could even cause us not to look for food or water to survive.
6. Association capacity
Being able to establish relationships between different events is a fundamental capacity not only for human beings but for any type of living being with the capacity to learn. In fact, It is the basis of any type of learning.
If we always maintained our perspective and vision of things, we would not be able to learn not to face something contrary to our way of understanding reality. Being flexible allows us to be able to adapt to new conditions and modify our schemes depending on what experience dictates.
It also allows us to be able to assume different perspectives and understand the motivations and thoughts of others being of great help for socialization.
8. Troubleshooting
Deeply linked to the previous one, the ability to use the knowledge acquired, 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 that we have had until now has allowed human beings to evolve, for example, contributing to generate new technologies, techniques and procedures that allow us to achieve our objectives or solve a problem in the most efficient way.
10. Perception
The ability to perceive is something that we usually take for granted, but the truth is that we can consider it one of the essential cognitive skills. It is about the ability to transform signals from the senses into information with which our brain is capable of working to perceive in a coordinated manner, for example, the different information that constitutes an image or what a person is telling 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 inhibit our already initiated behavioral patterns to deal with new information or change strategies if 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.
The past is important, but it is the ability to plan and anticipate results that allows us to begin establishing plans and appropriate actions to achieve our objectives. It also allows us assess risks and benefits as well as the possible consequences of our actions.
13. Symbolization and interpretation
Something fundamental for human beings is the ability to generate elements that allow an idea to be represented, as well as the ability to value what a given action or symbol implies. This allows us, for example communicate with our peers and socialize something peremptory for a gregarious species like ours.
14. Language
Although more than a cognitive ability it could be considered an activity or product of this, the truth is that language is a fundamental capacity when it comes to relating and transmitting information. We are not just talking about speech but also of reading, writing, gestures or expressions.
15. Metacognition
A highly relevant cognitive skill is being able to value and think about one’s own cognition. Metacognition allows us to take into account our abilities and knowledge, analyzing, for example, the type of information we lack to understand a situation or optimize and improve our abilities.
