What are cognitive skills?

Cognitive skills are the basic mental abilities that we use to think, study and learn. Cognitive skills accelerate learner's efficiency, strengthen their ability and capability in learning ability.

Key Points

• Cognitive skills have some essential components. These are:
  • Perception: Perception refers to looking things from right perspective. Perception is contextualized, subjective and depends on many other extraneous surrounding factors.
  • Memory: Memory is one of the main components of cognitive skills that help learner in remembering, and recapitulating events or concepts or particular objects in their actual forms.
  • Critical thinking: It means thinking step by step or in a chronological order. It improvises our performance in reading, writing, searching and organizing study material. It promotes an individual to engage in critical thinking. 
  • Concentration: Concentrating is one of the chief mental functions of human being. It is an ability that assists learner to remain mentally alert on a particular object, issue, or subject content and observe the same. 

Hence, we can conclude that engaging in critical thinking is a cognitive skill.