What are Cognitive Skills?

Cognitive skills are the core skills your brain uses to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. Working together, they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge you use every day at school, at work, and in life. 

Brain training trains the cognitive skills the brain uses to think and learn. Cervelle’s goal is to provide one-on-one brain training that uses years of research to target the underlying skills that are important to how each person is able to  learn and perform. Over the years I have helped clients with reading struggles and dyslexia, attention struggles and ADHD, memory decline, learning disabilities, and more.

Each of your cognitive skills plays an important part in processing new information. That means if even one of these skills is weak, no matter what kind of information is coming your way, grasping, retaining, or using that information is impacted. In fact, most learning struggles are caused by one or more weak cognitive skills.

Here’s a brief description of each of your cognitive skills, as well as struggles you may be experiencing if that skill is weak:

ATTENTION/SUSTAINED

What it does: Enables you to stay focused and on task for a sustained period of time.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Lots of unfinished projects, jumping from task to task.

ATTENTION/SELECTIVE

What it does: Enables you to stay focused and on a task despite any distractions.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Easily distracted.

ATTENTION/DIVIDED

What it does: Enables you to remember information while doing two things at once.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Difficulty multitasking, frequent mistakes.

MEMORY/LONG-TERM

What it does: Enables you to recall information stored in the past.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Forgetting names, doing poorly on tests, forgetting things you used to know.

MEMORY/WORKING (OR SHORT-TERM)

What it does: Enables you to hang on to information while in the process of using it.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Having to read the directions again in the middle of a project, difficulty following multi-step directions, forgetting what was just said in a conversation.

LOGIC & REASONING

What it does: Enables you to reason, form ideas, and solve problems, look at things from start to finish.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Frequently asking, “What do I do next?” or saying, “I don’t get this,” struggling with math, feeling stuck or overwhelmed.

AUDITORY PROCESSING

What it does: Enables you to analyze, blend, and segment sounds.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Struggling with learning to read, reading fluency, or reading comprehension.

VISUAL PROCESSING

What it does: Enables you to think in visual images.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Difficulties understanding what you’ve just read, remembering what you’ve read, following directions, reading maps, doing word math problems.

PROCESSING SPEED

What it does: Enables you to perform tasks quickly and accurately.

Common problems when this skill is weak: Most tasks are more difficult. Taking a long time to complete tasks for school or work, frequently being the last one in a group to finish something.

I still work diligently to individualize each student’s curriculum, and I will continue to do so, but the focus of this cognitive skill development program that I am creating is using it as a fun and entertaining way of learning and challenging their brains. Over the past year it has fast become a proven effective way to engage clients of all ages. I have students as young as 4 who are working on developing their problem solving and creative thinking skills, and students who are in college programs who are fine-tuning their own skill base to become more successful in their advanced classes. I am so excited about this because I believe fun and learning should be the same thing, not a choice we have to make!!