Cognitive Skills = Thinking Skills = Learning Skills

Cognitive skills are the thinking skills that make learning and achieving possible. Each cognitive skill plays a key role in a person’s ability to succeed. If one or more of these skills is weak, learning will be difficult, if not impossible. Research shows that these underlying thinking skills can be radically improved through Brain Training.

Attention

:  Sustained Attention allows you to pay attention for a period of time; Selective Attention allows you to pay attention to one task while other things are going on around you; Divided Attention allows you to do more than one thing at a time. Recent research has shown that attention skills can be trained, and ADD/ADHD can be improved without medication.

Auditory Processing Skills

involve the following three things:

• Auditory Processing is the ability to distinguish, recognize, identify, analyze and conceptualize what is heard. 
• Auditory Discriminationis the ability to hear the differences in sounds including volume, pitch, duration and phoneme.
• Phonemic Awareness is the ability to blend sounds together to make words, separate all the sounds out in a word, be able to manipulate them and analyze them.  It includes the ability to recognize how many sounds are in a word and their sequence in the word.

Auditory processing is one of the major underlying skills needed to read and spell.

Long-Term Memory

is the ability of the brain to store information and recall it quickly and efficiently when needed.

Processing Speed

is the rate that the brain handles information; basically, how fast the brain thinks. If processing speed is slow, all work will be slow! Processing speed is the ability to perform automatic thinking tasks, particularly when measured under pressure to maintain focused attention.

Working Memory:

Information is retained for short periods of time while processing it or working with it in some way.  Information comes to the brain from all five senses and working memory sorts the information, prioritizes it, discards what isn’t important or makes the decision to store it for later use.

Visual Processing

is the ability to distinguish and recognize visual images; to analyze and to think in visual images. It includes the ability to store and recall visual images.
                        

Logic and Reasoning

 is the ability to reason, make priorities and plan.  It includes the ability to form concepts and problem-solve using unfamiliar or novel procedures.