Cognitive functions

Orientation

What is orientation?

Orientation is the ability that allows us to be aware of ourselves and of the context we are in at a given moment.

• Personal orientation: the ability to integrate information about one’s personal history and identity.
• Temporal orientation: the ability to handle information about the day, time, month, year, when to carry out behaviors, holidays, seasons, etc.
• Spatial orientation: the ability to handle information about where one comes from, where one is at a specific moment, where one is going, etc.

Gnosis

What is gnosis?

Gnosis is the brain’s ability to recognize previously learned information, such as objects, people or places, through our senses. In this sense, there is gnosis for each sensory channel and gnosis that combines different channels.

• Visual gnosis: the ability to visually recognize different elements and give them meaning: objects, faces, places, colors, etc.
• Auditory gnosis: the ability to recognize different sounds by hearing.
• Tactile gnosis: the ability to recognize different objects, textures, temperatures, etc. by touch.
• Olfactory gnosis: the ability to recognize different odors by smell.
• Gustatory gnosis: the ability to recognize different flavors by taste.
• Body schema: the ability to recognize and mentally represent the body as a whole and its different parts, the movements we can make with each of them, and the orientation of the body in space.

Attention

What is attention?

Attention is the process by which we can direct our mental resources to certain aspects of the environment, the most relevant ones, or to carrying out certain actions that we consider most appropriate among the possible ones. It refers to the state of observation and alertness that allows us to become aware of what is happening around us (Ballesteros, 2000).

In other words, attention is the ability to generate, direct and maintain an appropriate state of activation for the correct processing of information.

Within this function we must talk about 5 different processes:

• Sustained attention: the ability to smoothly keep the focus of attention on a task or event for a prolonged period of time.
• Selective attention: the ability to direct attention and focus on something without letting other stimuli, external or internal, interrupt the task.
• Alternating attention: the ability to smoothly shift our focus of attention from one task or internal rule to another.
• Processing speed: the pace at which the brain performs a task (which obviously varies depending on the task and the other cognitive functions involved in it).
• Hemineglect: great difficulty or inability to direct attention towards one side (usually the left), both in relation to one’s own body and to space.

Executive functions

What are executive functions?

Executive functions are complex mental activities needed to plan, organize, guide, review, regulate and evaluate the behavior required to adapt effectively to the environment and achieve goals (Bauermeister, 2008).

Within executive functions we find different processes that are essential in our daily lives:

• Working memory: a system that allows information to be maintained, manipulated and transformed in the mind.
• Planning: the ability to set goals, develop action plans to achieve them (sequences of steps) and choose the most appropriate one based on anticipating consequences.
• Reasoning: the ability to compare results, make inferences and establish abstract relationships.
• Flexibility: the ability to generate new strategies to adapt behavior to changing demands of the environment.
• Inhibition: the ability to ignore impulses or irrelevant information, both internal and external, while performing a task.
• Decision making: the ability to decide on a course of action after weighing the different possible options and their possible results and consequences.
• Time estimation: the ability to roughly calculate the passage of time and the duration of an activity or event.
• Dual tasking: the ability to perform two tasks at the same time (which must therefore be of a different type), paying constant attention to both.
• Branching (multitasking): the ability to organize and optimally perform tasks simultaneously, alternating between them and knowing at all times where each one stands.

Praxis

What is praxis?

Praxis refers to acquired motor skills. In other words, they are the organized movements we make to carry out a plan or achieve a goal.

Within praxis we distinguish between:

• Ideomotor praxis: the ability to intentionally perform a simple movement or gesture.
• Ideational praxis: the ability to manipulate objects through a sequence of gestures, which involves knowing the function of the object, knowing the action and knowing the serial order of the acts that lead to that action.
• Facial praxis: the ability to voluntarily perform movements or gestures with different parts of the face: lips, tongue, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, etc.
• Visuoconstructive praxis: the ability to plan and perform the movements needed to arrange a series of elements in space to form a final drawing or figure.

Language

What is language?

Language is a higher function that develops the symbolization processes related to encoding and decoding.

Language production consists of materializing signs (sound or written) that symbolize objects, ideas, etc., according to a convention specific to a linguistic community (Lecours et al., 1979).

Within language there are several processes that can be affected:

• Expression: the ability to formulate meaningful and grammatically correct ideas.
• Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning of words and ideas.
• Vocabulary: knowledge of the lexicon.
• Naming: the ability to name objects, people or events.
• Fluency: the ability to produce linguistic content quickly and effectively.
• Discrimination: the ability to recognize, differentiate and interpret language-related content.
• Repetition: the ability to produce the same sounds that are heard.
• Writing: the ability to transform ideas into symbols, characters and images.
• Reading: the ability to interpret symbols, characters and images and transform them into speech.

Memory

What is memory?

Memory is the ability to effectively encode, store and retrieve learned information or a lived event. Within memory we distinguish between:

• Episodic memory: refers to information about facts and lived experiences, all placed in space and time.
• Semantic memory: refers to general knowledge.
• Procedural memory: refers to learned actions or sequences of acts, most of which we perform automatically without having to think about each gesture or movement (they are usually hard to put into words).

Social cognition

What is social cognition?

The set of cognitive and emotional processes through which we interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the social world. It refers to how we think about ourselves, about others and their behavior, and about social relationships, and how we make sense of all this information and behave based on it.

Thanks to social cognition we are able to interpret other people’s emotions.

Visuospatial skills

What are visuospatial skills?

They are the ability to mentally represent, analyze and manipulate objects.

Regarding visuospatial skills, we work with two important concepts:

• Spatial relations: the ability to mentally represent and manipulate objects in two dimensions.
• Spatial visualization: the ability to mentally represent and manipulate objects in three dimensions.