Cognitive Assessment

What is cognitive assessment

Cognitive skills can be described as your "thinking skills".  Your brain is like a computer.  It has to take in information, manipulate it and then produce a response (producing a spread sheet).

We do the same, we have to be able to understand and concentrate on information in our surroundings, then we process it and make sense of it, and link it to any similar information in our memory, and then we take actions, like make a plan and solve problems.

Our actions are continually monitored and regulated by our high level cognitive skills (self regulation) to ensure we are being effective. For example, when explaining to someone how something works will be continually assessing if we are making sense to them, by looking at their facial expressions, and adapt our approach accordingly.

Who may benefit from cognitive assessment?

How is this achieved?

These are assessed in two ways:

• Assessing how someone carries out everyday tasks that are either familiar or unfamiliar to them. OT's use everyday tasks to assess someone's ability after completing an analysis of what skills are required to complete a task.

• Carrying out psychological standardised assessments.  These provide a numerical outcome that indicates if there is an impairment and to what level.  These assessments have been trialled on various people (those with and without cognitive impairments) to identify what a score indicates.  For example what score is expected of someone of a certain age and with no known brain injury.

These two types of assessment are often used in combination as they provide a full picture of someone's performance.  As individuals may perform better or worse in either situation.  For example, some of use do well in exams, whilst some of us are more practical!

 

The outcome of these assessments are then analysed to identify the persons strengths and weaknesses.  From this a cognitive rehabilitation programme can be identified.