What are cognitive skills?
Cognitive Skills are the progressive building of learning skills, such as attention, memory and thinking. These crucial skills enable children to process sensory information and eventually learn to evaluate, analyze, remember, make comparisons as well as understand cause and effect. 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
There are typically 8 identified categories of cognitive skills:
1. Attention to task
2. Inhibition control
3. Information processing
4. Working memory (how to use the information that was processed)
5. Mental and emotional flexibility and adaptability
6. Problem solving skills
7. Pattern recognition
8. Social Emotional/ Relationship skills
4 Stages of cognitive formation:
SENSORIMOTOR LEARNING: A child learns from sensory experience of the world around them.
PREOPERATIONAL LEARNING: A child begins to have an imagination, problem solves, understands concrete ideas, as well as recognize symbols such as letters and signs.
CONCRETE LEARNING: Children begin to understand things outside of themselves. This is when empathy and the understanding of others feelings, and how their actions affect others.
FORMAL LEARNING: This is when children and people begin to consider the past and future. They use logic and creativity to solve problems, begin to recognize the greater world around them, and plan for the future.
Why are early cognitive skills important?
Children should be able to improve their ability to focus, to remember information and think more critically as they age. Cognitive skills allow children to understand the relationships between ideas, to grasp the process of cause and effect and to improve their analytical skills. Cognitive skills begin to form the day we are born, starting with recognition of faced, familiar voices, and the acquisition of our native language. The simple baby toys such as rattles, pull toys, stacking blocks and shape sorters are all tools (OK, we call them toys) that help set those foundational cognitive skills. As we age, those cognitive skills allow for more complex thinking. In general, our cognitive skills are what we need to make sense of and interact with our world.
Sometimes children fail to hit age-appropriate cognitive skill milestones.4 Since all children are different and meet milestones at their own pace, failing to meet the mark at a certain age doesn’t necessarily mean a child has a learning disability. As with the rest of our body, our mind is no different, in the fact that milestones and systems are interdependent and intertwined with each other. Cognitive processing relays on functional processing of sensory experience, self-regulation, good nutrition, enough sleep, and solid social emotional skills. If you’re concerned about your child’s cognitive development, don’t ignore the warning signs or your gut instincts. Speak to your child’s teacher, pediatrician, or therapist about your concerns.
IF YOU ARE CONCERNED, TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS AND DON’T WAIT – CALL TODAY
How Therapy Can Help? Nature vs. Nurture
While research has found that genetics play a role in a child’s cognitive skills, these skills are also taught through practice and training. Children can be taught to focus on completing a task by removing distractions such as Phones, TV and Video Games. If identified as a need, therapy that addressed social emotional, sensory, and feeding (nutrition) can also play a dramatic role in improving a child’s cognitive skills.
Activities you can start with now at home: (Early Intervention)
Social Emotional and Cognitive Skills Checklist: Early Intervention)