PERSONA THEME
ISSUES
Cognitive Development: Before and After Birth-Myths and the Realities
NEWSCOPE
RESEARCH
ISSUES
WELL-BEING
TRENDS
Written by KUSUMIKA KRORI DUTTA
C
ognition simply means the process of thinking and learning with knowledge and experience. In today’s rapidly developing era, cognitive skills render the power to live a happy and healthy life. But despite so many myth-busting articles available, the existence of cognition is often associated with certain myths. Cognitive skills 8 Are God-gifted; i.e., they exist from the birth 8 Can be developed over time; irrespective of their prenatal development 8 Can only be developed until a certain age, as 60
And the list continues‌.. Here in the following article, we intend to explore the answers to many such rational queries. WHAT IS COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT? To begin with, one must understand, what is cognitive skill and how does it affect the individuals? Among the variety of available literature on cognitive skills, it is most simply defined as how an individual perceives the world and acts accordingly. It is the set of mental abilities or processes which are connected to nearly each human action.
Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills thaten able an individual to execute any task from the simplest to the most complex ones. They involve the mechanisms of how one learns, remembers, solves problems, and pay attention, rather than with any actual prior knowledge. For instance, memory skills rely mainly on parts of the temporal lobes and parts of the frontal lobes (behind the forehead). The given figure shows the different parts of the human brain responsible for different cognitive skills.
