Category Cognitive Abilities

The useful question in cognitive load theory is not "How do we make learning easy?" but "Which difficulty belongs to the learning, and which difficulty did we accidentally create?"

A task does not carry a fixed amount of cognitive load. The same information can overwhelm a novice and feel effortless to an expert.

The lowest score in a cognitive profile is not automatically a weakness---and a weakness is not automatically an impairment.

The phrase "cognitive strength" sounds straightforward until you ask: strong compared with whom?

Psychology discovered a remarkably durable pattern more than a century ago. It still has not settled what causes it.

A person can understand language at a very high level while finding it harder to keep several arbitrary pieces of information active at once.

A mind can be unusually good at finding the answer without being unusually fast at getting there.

Working memory and fluid reasoning are closely related. What remains surprisingly difficult to establish is why.

Faster minds tend, on average, to score higher on intelligence tests. The difficult question is what that association actually means.

You can understand every part of a problem and still struggle to solve it. Executive control helps explain why insight and successful execution are not the same thing.