What is cognitive development?

• Mental skills will improve with increasing
• Growth of brain functioning skills include
  • Perception (making sense of things)
  • Memory (remembering things)
  • Thinking processes (concrete and abstract)
• Your thinking changes from being concrete to being more abstract
• Develop due to interaction between nature (maturation) and nurture (learning and experience) and the interaction with the environment (sociocultural influences)
• Cognitive development happens at different rates in different people

How to enhance your cognitive skills?

• Be physically active and keep fit
• Eat healthy
• Learn new skills whenever possible:
  • Academic skills (e.g. learning, memory, analyzing, scanning, etc)
  • Social skills (e.g. making friends, keeping friends, conversations)
  • Daily living skills (e.g. self-care, house-keeping, time management)
  • Movement skills (e.g. play, games, sports, maneuvering)
  • Problem-solving skills (e.g. finding ways out of trouble) 
• Attention training.
• Listening skills
• Speed up mental processing
• Multi-sensory processing
• Memory strategies
  • Rehearsal or repetition training
  • Organize information (e.g. mind mapping, categorizing)
  • Visual images
  • Information chunking
  • External memory aids
    • Diaries
    • Calendar
    • Alarm
    • Reminders
• Problem solving skills

Please refer to the counsellors or psychologist in school for more details.