What Are Cognitive Abilities? Examples, Skills & Memory’s Role

What are cognitive abilities, exactly?

Memory, attention, reasoning and spatial awareness are part of the definition.

But you’ll also see terms like cognitive skills, cognitive functions and cognitive attributes used alongside them.

That can make the topic more confusing than it needs to be.

Part of the problem is that researchers, educators and other writers do not always use these terms in exactly the same way.

So rather than forcing them into rigid categories, let’s look at some useful distinctions.

We’ll also look at something especially important if you’re interested in learning and memory: Which cognitive skills can you actually practice?

Let’s dive in.

What Are Cognitive Abilities?

Cognitive abilities are the mental capacities we use to perceive information, pay attention, remember, understand, reason and solve problems. Depending on the field and the researcher, you may see somewhat different lists of cognitive abilities. Common examples include:

• Attention
• Memory
• Language
• Reasoning
• Perception
• Spatial processing
• Problem solving

Spatial awareness provides a useful example. As Albert Postma and Ineke van der Ham explore in The Neuropsychology of Space, our ability to understand locations, distances and orientations involves multiple forms of spatial processing. Vision is obviously important, but our experience of space can involve other senses as well. Memory works in a similar way. We often speak about “memory” as if it were one thing. In practice, researchers distinguish between several kinds of memory involved in different tasks. For example, you can explore:

• Autobiographical memory
• Episodic memory
• Procedural memory
• Prospective memory
• Working memory

These distinctions matter because a broad term like “cognitive ability” can describe many different mental processes.

Cognitive Abilities Vs. Cognitive Skills

The words ability and skill often overlap, so there isn’t much value in pretending that every author uses them according to one universal rule.

For practical purposes, however, one distinction is very useful.

Cognitive abilities can refer broadly to capacities such as attention, memory, perception and reasoning.

Cognitive skills can refer to learned ways of using those capacities to accomplish particular tasks.

For example, reading comprehension draws on attention, language and memory. But reading itself is also a learned skill that develops through instruction and practice.

Likewise, a mnemonic strategy is not the same thing as memory itself. A mnemonic is a learned technique you can use when you want to remember specific information more reliably. Examples of learned cognitive skills can include:

• Language learning
• Reading comprehension strategies
• Reasoning skills
• Reflective thinking
• Analytical thinking
• Note taking
• Knowledge organization
• Using mnemonic techniques

This distinction also helps us ask a better question than simply, “Can I improve my cognitive abilities?” Instead, we can ask: What specific task do I want to become better at, and what strategies can I practice?

4 Cognitive Skills You Can Practice

Stephen Reed’s Cognitive Skills You Need for the 21st Century provides one useful framework for thinking about learned intellectual skills. The following four categories are particularly useful for students, lifelong learners and anyone interested in remembering more of what they learn.

1. Acquiring New Knowledge

Learning something new requires more than simply encountering information. Depending on the task, you may need to:

• Pay attention to important details
• Understand new terminology
• Connect new ideas with things you already know
• Categorize information
• Review important material
• Recall it when you need it

This is one reason memory techniques interest me so much. Instead of hoping that information “sticks,” mnemonic strategies give you deliberate procedures for encoding and reviewing material. That doesn’t mean every technique works equally well for every task. It means you can develop a toolkit and learn when to use each strategy.

2. Organizing Knowledge

Learning and organization go hand in hand. If you’re studying a complicated topic, it helps to identify important concepts and establish relationships between them. You can organize information externally with tools such as:

• Note taking techniques
• Mind mapping
• Outlines
• Diagrams
• Flashcards

You can also organize information mentally.

One of the oldest and most useful tools for doing this is the Memory Palace technique.

Instead of repeatedly reading information and hoping you’ll remember it, the Memory Palace gives you a structured set of locations you can associate with the material you want to recall.

As a learned skill, you use it to choose locations, creating memorable associations and retrieving the information in an orderly way.

As scholars such as Tyson Yunkaporta and Lynne Kelly have discussed, spatial approaches to organizing and remembering knowledge have a long history. If you’d like guided practice using the Memory Palace and related mnemonic techniques, I’ve put together a free course that walks you through the fundamentals:

3. Reasoning Skills

Reasoning involves working with information so you can reach conclusions, compare possibilities and evaluate claims. Like memory techniques, reasoning strategies can be studied and practiced deliberately.

For example, you can learn the distinction between logical and rational thinking and explore the difference between objective and subjective reasoning. You can also practice analytical thinking by breaking larger questions into smaller parts and examining how those parts relate to one another. If you want to work on this area, you can:

• Read these critical thinking books
• Try these critical thinking exercises
• Explore these critical thinking quotes
• Learn about common barriers to critical thinking

Memory matters here too. Reasoning about a topic is much easier when you can recall its important terms, principles and examples. That’s one reason I teach memory techniques as tools for learning rather than as isolated tricks.

4. Problem Solving Skills

Problem solving involves identifying what you’re trying to accomplish, considering possible approaches and testing solutions. Instead of starting from scratch every time, it can help to learn established problem solving models. You can also build experience by working on different kinds of puzzles, projects and practical challenges.

The goal isn’t to acquire some vague state of being “smarter.” It’s to become more familiar with useful strategies and more skilled at recognizing when to apply them.

Can You Improve Cognitive Skills?

Yes, many cognitive skills can be learned and practiced. But it’s important to be precise about what that means.

Getting better at a particular technique or task does not automatically mean you’ve increased your intelligence or transformed every aspect of cognition. A more useful goal is to identify the particular activity you care about and practice strategies that support it. For example, if you want to remember names, vocabulary, speeches, historical facts or information for an exam, you can learn specific mnemonic techniques for those tasks. Some of the techniques I teach include:

• The Memory Palace technique
• Mnemonic devices
• The PAO system
• The pegword method
• Cognitive mapping

Each technique gives you a particular way to work with information.

For example, a Memory Palace combines familiar locations with associations. A pegword system gives you a reusable structure for attaching information to known cues.

A PAO system provides a compact encoding system that is especially popular for memorizing ordered information.

The useful question is therefore not: “How do I boost my brain?” A much better question is: “What do I want to remember or learn, and which technique fits that goal?”

Why Memory Techniques Belong In The Cognitive Skills Conversation

Memory is involved in almost everything we learn. But that doesn’t mean memory techniques magically improve every form of thinking. Their value is much more practical. They give you procedures for working deliberately with information you want to remember. For example, when using a Memory Palace, you have to:

• Identify the information worth remembering
• Organize it into manageable units
• Associate those units with familiar locations
• Create memorable cues
• Practice recalling the material

Those are concrete activities you can learn, practice and refine. And that’s the approach I’ve found most useful in teaching memory: Focus on techniques, practice them with real information and become more deliberate about how you learn.

Cognitive Abilities: Keep The Terms Useful

It’s easy to get lost in debates about whether something should be called a cognitive ability, cognitive skill, cognitive function or cognitive attribute. Those distinctions can matter in academic contexts, but the terminology isn’t always used consistently. For everyday learning, a simpler framework is often more useful:

• Cognitive abilities are broad mental capacities involved in activities such as attention, memory, perception and reasoning.
• Cognitive skills are learned strategies and procedures you can use when carrying out particular tasks.
• Practice can make you more skilled at specific strategies without requiring exaggerated claims about increasing general intelligence or cognitive capacity.

For me, that’s where memory training becomes especially interesting. You don’t have to wait around hoping you’ll remember more. You can learn specific methods for encoding, organizing and recalling the information that matters to you, and then practice using those methods. If you’d like more ways to put these ideas into action, take a look at these cognitive activities for adults next.