cognitive competence / cognitive skills

Ability to use one's knowledge, know-how, aptitudes and experience to find, understand and synthetise new information, reflect on ideas, apply reasoning to communicate, carry out tasks, solve problems and take decisions.

Comment

Functions and processes mobilised in cognitive competence include:

  • perception (to recognise and interpret sensory stimuli);
  • attention (to concentrate on a particular object, action, or thought);
  • information processing (to trigger and perform different mental operations);
  • memory (to mobilise information stored in the short-term and long-term memory);
  • motor skills/praxis (to handle an object);
  • language (to translate sounds into words and generate verbal outputs);
  • visuospatial processing (to process visual stimuli, understand spatial relationship between objects and visualise images and scenarios);
  • decision-making;
  • execution (to plan and achieve an objective).
Source

Cedefop.

Related term(s)
key competences