Cognitive skills are the mental abilities your brain uses to think, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. If you searched “which examples are both cognitive skills,” you’re likely looking at a test or assignment question that asks you to pick two items from a list that both qualify as cognitive skills, as opposed to physical abilities, personality traits, or soft skills. The answer depends on your specific list, but understanding what counts as a cognitive skill will let you identify the right pair every time.
What Counts as a Cognitive Skill
Cognitive skills are mental processes involved in acquiring and using knowledge. Clinical neuropsychology organizes them into several core domains: attention and concentration, memory, processing speed, language, executive functioning (reasoning and problem solving), and sensation and perception. Any skill that falls into one of these categories is a cognitive skill.
What doesn’t count? Personality traits like sociability, conscientiousness, or agreeableness. Physical abilities like strength or coordination. Soft skills like teamwork or leadership. Work habits like punctuality or effort. These are sometimes called “non-cognitive skills” precisely because they sit outside the mental processing categories listed above. If an item on your list describes something your brain does to take in, store, manipulate, or act on information, it’s cognitive. If it describes a behavior, attitude, or social tendency, it’s not.
Common Cognitive Skill Pairs
Here are examples that frequently appear together in test questions, all of which are genuine cognitive skills:
- Attention and memory. Attention is the ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions. Memory is the ability to encode, store, and retrieve information. Both are core cognitive domains.
- Problem solving and critical thinking. These both fall under executive functioning, the highest-complexity cognitive domain. They involve analyzing situations, weighing options, and reaching conclusions.
- Working memory and processing speed. Working memory is holding information in mind while simultaneously manipulating it. Processing speed is how quickly you can complete mental tasks. Both are measurable cognitive capacities, and they interact closely: slower processing speed can make working memory tasks harder, even when memory itself is intact.
- Logic and reasoning. Both involve drawing conclusions from available information. Logic applies rules to reach a valid answer; reasoning evaluates evidence and makes judgments. These overlap heavily with executive functioning.
- Reading comprehension and pattern recognition. Reading comprehension is a language-based cognitive skill. Pattern recognition draws on attention, memory, and reasoning together. Both require mental processing of information.
How to Spot the Non-Cognitive Distractor
Most multiple-choice versions of this question include at least one option that sounds like a skill but isn’t cognitive. Common distractors include empathy, motivation, self-discipline, cooperation, and physical endurance. The trick is straightforward: if the skill requires your brain to process, store, or reason through information, it’s cognitive. If it describes how you relate to other people or how hard you work, it falls outside the cognitive category.
Self-control is an interesting edge case. Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress an automatic response in favor of a more appropriate one, is a core executive function and therefore cognitive. But “self-discipline” as a general work habit is typically classified as non-cognitive. Context matters, so look at how the term is framed in your question.
The Executive Function Group
Many test questions pull their cognitive skill pairs from executive functioning, because this domain contains several distinct but related abilities. The three core executive functions are inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. These three support each other constantly. You need working memory to hold a goal in mind so you know what to inhibit. You need inhibitory control to avoid fixating on one idea so your working memory can juggle multiple pieces of information. And cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift perspectives or adapt to new rules, builds on both.
If your question lists any two of these three, both are cognitive skills. The same applies to higher-level abilities built from them, like planning, organizing, and abstract reasoning.
Bloom’s Taxonomy as a Clue
Some versions of this question draw from Bloom’s Taxonomy, an educational framework that ranks cognitive skills by complexity. The six levels, from simplest to most demanding, are: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. Every one of these is a cognitive skill. If your list includes two items from this framework, such as “analyzing” and “evaluating,” both are cognitive. They describe progressively complex ways your brain works with information, from basic recall all the way up to generating something new.
Putting It Together
When you see a question asking “which examples are both cognitive skills,” scan each option for whether it describes a mental process involving thinking, remembering, reasoning, or paying attention. Eliminate anything that describes a personality trait, a social behavior, or a physical ability. The remaining pair, whether it’s attention and memory, logic and problem solving, or any other combination of mental processing abilities, is your answer.