COGNITION part 1: terminology and impact after concussion

Orientation. We can also call this basic awareness. Orientation is your knowledge of

Attention. This is a function that requires both a state of arousal or alertness and in essence is your ability to attend to stimuli in your environment. There are several levels of attention to be considered.

1. Focused attention. This is your ability to perceive, and acknowledge, specific information from your environment. For example, this is noticing that your housemate has added a new fridge magnet to your collection.
2. Sustained attention. This is your ability to maintain attention over a period of time during a continuous activity. For example, this is your ability to read this article right now, you have probably already been reading for about a minute, good for you!
3. Selective attention. This is your ability to process information selectively. To do this you need to both be able to inhibit attending to the irrelevant stimuli, while attending to the target stimuli. For example, this is your ability to focus on the conversation that you are having with your friend at the bubble tea place, when the couple at the table beside you is having a very interesting fight, but you focus on your friend (again, good for you!).
4. Alternating attention. This is your ability to shift focus between tasks that demand different behavioural or cognitive skills. For example, you are at the gym (good for you) and are working out on a machine, when you are done that set, you talk to your friend, then you do your next set, you switch between those two things.
5. Divided attention. This refers to your ability to respond to two or more events or stimuli simultaneously. For example, you are driving to work and are able to focus on the road, oncoming traffic, signs, other moving objects in the vicinity, hear the horns, and think about how to get where you are going, all at the same time.

Memory. This is your ability to encode, store, and retrieve information. It is the reason that you can learn. Again within this domain, there are many different types of memory, here are a few that are relevant to our purpose.

1. Short-term memory. This is the capacity for storing information or stimuli, for, you guessed it, a short period of time. For example, short-term memory is used when you are chatting with a cute girl and remember their phone number, because they just told you.
2. Working memory. This is more of an active process, and typically refers to the manipulation of information or stimuli, above and beyond the storage of it. For example, that cute girl told you her number, and now you have to work to keep it in your memory before you get out your phone and type it in.
3. Long-term memory. This is the division of memory responsible for information that is held for a long-term, or indefinitely. This includes explicit memory (aka declarative), which is the information that you can consciously recall, like past experiences (episodic memory) and facts (semantic memory), and also implicit (aka procedural) memory, which is your ability to remember unconsciously, for example how to ride a bike. We can also think about prospective memory, which is your memory for things that have yet to happen (e.g. I have an appointment with my OT on Wednesday), and retrospective memory, which is memory for things that have already happened (e.g. I had an appointment with my OT yesterday).

Executive Functioning. This is more of a complex domain and essentially is a grouping of all higher level cognition. This is higher level cognition, because in order to complete executive functions, you will need to use the basic functions of attention and memory. Executive function can include reasoning (deduction and induction), sequencing and planning, forming concepts, abstract thinking, and problem solving. For example, when you are playing Settlers of Catan (or any boardgame) with your friends and you block your friends from building anything, while scoring points yourself.

Processing Speed. This is the time it takes you to perform a cognitive function or task. For example, your friend asks you how many years you have been playing the flute, processing speed is how long it takes you retrieve that information from memory, or do the mental math necessary. On any task there is a trade off between accuracy and processing speed. Think about being a goalie in soccer when someone is kicking a ball toward your net. You can either act faster, committing to the location you think the ball will be, and risk the greater chance of being incorrect, or you can act slower, and likely be more correct, but also be more likely to miss the ball.

Metacognition. This is your ability to think about your thinking. Metacognition is how we know that we make errors, or how we choose certain cognitive strategies to use in different situations. For example when you have to learn a phone number, a common strategy to use is repetition, you repeat the number until it sticks in your memory. Knowing to use that strategy requires you to have metacognition, awareness about your own cognition.

Social Cognition. Now there is some debate as to whether social cognition is a separate entity or whether it is simply “cold” cognition with added context. Regardless, social cognition is an important part of your health because these are the functions that allow you to interact with the other people in the world. Social cognition includes the following abilities.

1. alexithymia, which is your ability to recognize and describe emotions in yourself;
2. recognize cues, which includes verbal (e.g. voice tone) and nonverbal (e.g. facial expressions);
3. be empathetic, which can be either cognitively by understanding the context and emotions (e.g. you know that your friend is disappointed when her favourite ice cream flavour has sold out), or emotionally by experiencing those emotions yourself (e.g. your friend just experienced a loss and they feel sad, you then also feel sad); and
4. make inferences, or use theory of mind, to know what others may be thinking and feeling (e.g. my friend is happy because he just won an award for being a superstar athlete).