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Cognitive abilities are often thought of in a hierarchical basis. Lower-level cognitive processes include perception, attention, memory, and learning. Higher-level cognitive processes include reasoning, problem-solving, creativity, and metacognition (awareness of and ability to regulate one’s thinking).

Attention Skills: A student's ability to attend to incoming information can be observed, broken down into a variety of sub-skills, and improved through properly coordinated training. We train and strengthen the three primary types of attention:

•Sustained Attention: The ability to remain focused and on task, and the amount of time we can focus.

•Selective Attention: The ability to remain focused and on task while being subjected to related and unrelated sensory input (distractions).

•Divided Attention: The ability to remember information while performing a mental operation and attending to two things at once (multi-tasking).

Memory: The ability to store and recall information:

•Long-Term Memory: The ability to recall information that was stored in the past. Long-term memory is critical for spelling, recalling facts on tests, and comprehension. Weak long-term memory skills create symptoms like forgetting names and phone numbers, and doing poorly on unit tests.

•Short-Term / Working Memory: The ability to apprehend and hold information in immediate awareness while simultaneously performing a mental operation. Students with short-term memory problems may need to look several times at something before copying, have problems following multi-step instructions, or need to have information repeated often.

Logic and Reasoning: The ability to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar information or novel procedures. Deductive reasoning extends this problem-solving ability to draw conclusions and come up with solutions by analyzing the relationships between given conditions. Students with underdeveloped logic and reasoning skills will generally struggle with word math problems and other abstract learning challenges. Symptoms of skill weaknesses in this area show up as questions like, "I don't get this", "I need help...this is so hard", or "What should I do first?"

Auditory Processing: The ability to analyze, blend, and segment sounds. Auditory processing is a crucial underlying skill for reading and spelling success, and is the number one skill needed for learning to read. Weakness in any of the auditory processing skills will greatly hinder learning to read, reading fluency, and comprehension. Students with auditory processing weakness also typically lose motivation to read.

Executive Functions

Abilities that enable goal-oriented behavior, such as the ability to plan, and execute a goal. These include: Flexibility: the capacity for quickly switching to the appropriate mental mode.

Theory of mind: insight into other people’s inner world, their plans, their likes and dislikes. Anticipation: prediction based on pattern recognition.

Problem-solving: defining the problem in the right way to then generate solutions and pick the right one. Decision making: the ability to make decisions based on problem-solving, on incomplete information and on emotions (ours and others’).

Working Memory: the capacity to hold and manipulate information “on-line” in real time. Emotional self-regulation: the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions for good performance.

Sequencing: the ability to break down complex actions into manageable units and prioritize them in the right order.

Inhibition: the ability to withstand distraction, and internal urges.

Visual Processing: The ability to perceive, analyze, and think in visual images. This includes visualization, which is the ability to create a picture in your mind of words or concepts. Students who have problems with visual processing may have difficulty following instructions, reading maps, doing word math problems, and comprehending.

Processing Speed: The ability to perform simple or complex cognitive tasks quickly. This skill also measures the ability of the brain to work quickly and accurately while ignoring distracting stimuli. Slow processing speed makes every task more difficult. Very often, slow processing is one root of ADHD-type behaviors. Symptoms of weaknesses here include homework taking a long time, always being the last one to get his or her shoes on, or being slow at completing even simple tasks.

* Remembering: Mere recall of specific facts, which does not depend on understanding.
* Understanding: The lowest level of comprehension – material is processed to make it available for other contexts.
* Applying: Using learned material including rules, concepts, methods, and theories to solve problems independently.
*Analysing: Breaking material down to identify the components, examine their inter-relationships, recognise the organisational principles, and analyse the structure of the whole.
* Evaluating: Evaluating draws on all the lower-level abilities, requires consolidating one’s thoughts, and usually has multiple ‘solutions’ thus widening the perspective.
* Creating: Putting together components to develop a new product, communication, concept, pattern, structure, or plan of action.

Consider the following activities and the underlying skills required to effectively execute these tasks. You will see how important strong underlying cognitive skills are to learning and everyday life.

Studying History: Visual Processing, Auditory Processing, Long-Term Memory, Comprehension

Math Word Problems: Working Memory, Visual Processing, Auditory Processing Logic and Reasoning, Comprehension

Playing Cards: Working Memory, Logic and Reasoning, Visual Processing, Long-Term Memory.

Driving a Car: Visual Processing, Attention Skills, Processing Speed

Writing a Letter: Logic and Reasoning, Auditory Processing, Visual Processing, Comprehension

Reading a Map: Visual Processing, Logic and Reasoning, Working Memory

Learning to Read: Auditory Processing, Visual Processing, Working Memory, Long-Term Memory

Assembling a Puzzle: Visual Processing, Logic and Reasoning, and Working Memory

Here are further guidelines.