Cognitive Performance

What is it and how to boost yours?

You’ve probably come across the terms “cognition” or “cognitive performance” in conversations, especially among students, athletes, business leaders, or academics. Yet, these words often float by without a clear definition. What do they really mean?

At its core, cognitive performance refers to how effectively your brain processes information, makes decisions, and solves problems. It’s the unseen force behind your ability to focus on work, strategise during training, or juggle life’s daily demands. And just like physical fitness or skill mastery, cognition isn’t fixed—you can optimise it, sharpen it, and make it work better for you.

What's cognition?

In simple terms, cognition refers to your ability to take in, process, understand, and use information. Some key components of cognition include (but are not limited to):

• Alertness refers to how awake and ready to take in information you are. Think of it as how "on" your brain is at any moment. How you perceive and interpret your surroundings. How likely you are to spot behaviours of others, and how likely you are to identify opportunities or risks in your personal or professional life

• Attention relates to your ability to remain focused and on task while ignoring distractions. Attention is one of your most valuable resources. In fact, other people and companies relentlessly compete for your attention. Regardless of your ability to focus your attention, you should always make it your priority to work on and improve your attention reserves, attention span, and ability to focus. Attention in the foundation of your cognitive abilities. Think of it like a mental equivalent of Zone 2 training for your body.

• Reaction time is how fast your brain can process information, respond to external circumstances, make a decision, or initiate an action. 

• Working memory is your brain's short-term storage. It allows you to hold information briefly to help you execute a task. The classic example is remembering a phone number long enough to dial it. Once you dial it, you can't remember it anymore. 

• Learning and memory relate to your brain's long-term storage. After you acquire information, your brain needs to process and store it for later use. For example, you can recall mission details because your brain effectively stores the information you received during training. 

• Reasoning and problem-solving skills help you draw logical conclusions from the information you have and find solutions to challenges. 

• Planning is your ability to think ahead, create a sequence of actions or tasks, and prioritize to achieve a specific goal.

• Decision-making is your ability to evaluate multiple options and select the best course of action.

• Social acuity is the awareness of, control over, and ability to manage interactions with others. High social acuity is the ability to read other people’s cues and then act appropriately.

• Spiritual readiness includes your ability to maintain beliefs, principles, and values needed to provide support in times of stress. Spiritual readiness includes the development of personal qualities needed to sustain a person in times of stress, hardship, and tragedy. These personal qualities may come from religious, philosophical or human values, and often form the basis for character, disposition,

  decision making and integrity.

You engage multiple aspects of your cognition all the time.

For example, a go/no-go decision in business or when deciding on a medical treatment engages your alertness, attention, decision-making, and reaction time, while also tapping into your spiritual readiness, planning, and short term memory. Deficiencies in any of those areas can lead to substandard performance (like making a wrong business decision that we regret later, or making an irreversible decision regarding medical treatment that can have life-long impact).

This means that your overall cognitive performance in any given moment is dependant on its weakest element. This is critical when deciding which areas of your cognitive performance to improve.

---

Write down and reflect:

• What is your weakest link?

• Why?

• How can you address it? Who can help you?

---

During flight operations, working memory helps to manage information, while problem-solving, reasoning, and reaction time allows you to deal with unexpected challenges. Any occupation that requires working with data or involves future planning relies heavily on learning, long- and short-term memory, and reasoning to integrate information and data with previous experiences; these jobs also require planning and decision-making to create a sound strategy. 

In your everyday life, you also use different combinations of your cognitive functions to organise and plan your week, choose a life partner, solve puzzles, decide who is in your social circles, learn new skills or concepts, make financial decisions, decide on large purchases, make other financial decision, among other things. 

What's cognitive performance?

“Cognitive performance” is a measure of how well your brain functions at performing tasks that require thinking and processing, learning, and remembering information.

Not all aspects of cognition are created equal, and different tasks tap into different cognitive skills. This is why your performance can shine in one area yet falter in another. You might excel at sustaining focus for hours but find yourself forgetful when it comes to recalling details.

Strength in one cognitive domain doesn’t guarantee success across the board—a reminder that cognition is as multifaceted as it is trainable.

Different tests are used to measure performance in different aspects of cognition. You wouldn't use the same test to measure muscular strength and cardiovascular endurance. Likewise, no single test can assess all your cognitive abilities.

For example, the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) involves pressing a button in response to a visual stimulus. PVT is frequently used in research studies to assess the effects of sleep deprivation and fatigue on alertness, attention, and reaction time. But, a different test, such as the delayed recall test, measures your ability to retain information. 

It's important to make the distinction between mental performance from cognitive performance. Mental performance is a broad concept that does include cognitive abilities, but it also includes emotional regulation, stress optimisation, motivation, and resilience.

In simple terms, mental performance includes both cognitive and emotional factors.

How to boost your cognitive performance

Just like any other aspect of your performance, cognition can be optimised. The science on the effectiveness of brain games and training to boost cognitive performance is still evolving. But investing in healthy habits across the well-researched domains is an effective way to sharpen your brain. 

Cognitive performance relies heavily on the following aspects: