What is Cognitive

Cognitive Ability is capacity to perceive, reason, or use intuition.

Cognitive is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes and states of intelligent entities (mostly humans, or human organizations), with a particular focus toward the study of such mental processes as comprehension, inferencing, decision-making, planning and learning. The description of cognitive or cognition tends to apply to processes such as memory, attention, perception, action, problem solving and mental imagery.

Cognitive abilities are the brain-based skills and mental processes that are needed to carry out any task - from the simplest to the most complex. Every task can be broken down into the different cognitive skills that are needed to complete that task successfully. If they are not used regularly, your cognitive abilities will diminish over time. Fortunately, these skills can also be improved at any age with regular practice.

This can include:

1. Alternating Attention: the ability to shift the focus of attention quickly.
2. Auditory Processing Speed: the time it takes to perceive relevant auditory stimuli, encode, and interpret it and then make an appropriate response.
3. Central Processing Speed: the time it takes to encode, categorize, and understand the meaning of any sensory stimuli.
4. Conceptual Reasoning: includes concept formation, abstraction, deductive logic, and/or inductive logic.
5. Divided Attention: the capability to recognize and respond to multiple stimuli at the same time.
6. Fine Motor Control: the ability to accurately control fine motor movements.
7. Fine Motor Speed: the time it takes to perform a simple motor response.
8. Focused (or Selective) Attention: the ability to screen out distracting stimuli.
9. Response Inhibition: the ability to avoid automatically reacting to incorrect stimuli.
10. Sustained Attention: the ability to maintain vigilance.
11. Visuospatial Classification: the ability to discriminate between visual objects based on a concept or rule.
12. Visuospatial Sequencing: the ability to discern the sequential order of visual objects based on a concept or rule.
13. Visual Perception: the ability to perceive fixed visual objects.
14. Visual Processing Speed: the time it takes to perceive visual stimuli.
15. Visual Scanning: the ability to find a random visual cue.
16. Visual Tracking: the ability to follow a continuous visual cue.
17. Working Memory: the ability to hold task-relevant information while processing it.

Cognitive ability tests are widely used throughout the world for employee selection because they do an excellent job of predicting performance in a large variety of positions, especially if the companies are adapting High-Involvement of their employees toward the job.

Cognitive ability tests are designed to measure such things as how well an individual reasons, solves problems, plans, organizes, thinks abstractly, learns quickly and grasps the nature of complex problems. As some researchers have stated, cognitive ability tests help evaluate a person’s capability to figure out their surroundings and determine the appropriate actions—informally it’s called “catching on,” “making sense of things,” or “figuring things out.” Cognitive ability tests have various labels and are also called intelligence tests, IQ tests, ability tests, aptitude tests, assessments of problem solving and assessments of general mental ability.

While it is sometimes thought that cognitive ability tests are simply a measure of education, in reality they measure very general mental capabilities.