What is the CognitiveMAP™?

Understanding your child’s unique brain fitness profile

Just like measuring how heavy a weight your arm muscles can lift before embarking on a physical training programme, measuring a student’s brain fitness level or cognitive skills helps us to understand the ‘mental weights’ the student should be lifting. It allows the trainer to determine the most optimal programme for the student to embark on based on his or her unique profile.

CognitiveMAP™ is a proprietary process that BrainFit Studio uses to measure the brain fitness level of a student prior to brain fitness enhancement. Besides allowing us to identify areas for improvement, this analysis of one’s cognitive skills also enable us to exploit the key mental strengths for success and peak performance.

What does a CognitiveMAP™ evaluate?

CognitiveMAP™ evaluates a student’s cognitive skills in the 5 brain fitness systems of:

1) Visual processing

2) Auditory processing

3) Sensory-Motor processing

4) Attention and Memory

5) Social-Emotional functioning

These 5 systems are important because whether you are learning to play golf, play the piano or solve a Math problem, they form the foundation of our “engine for learning”. For example, to be successful in the activities above, accurate listening (auditory brain fitness) to the coach’s instructions, the tune of music from the piano or the explanation from the teacher about the new Math concept is vital.

Our visual system (visual brain fitness) further supports our listening system as we watch the coach’s golf swing closely, look at the music scores line by line or study the Math diagrams the teacher has drawn on the blackboard. Our emotional system (social-emotional brain fitness) keeps our anxiety at bay and our motivation high as we learn these tasks for the first time, so that our attention system (attention brain fitness) can work efficiently to keep us focused on the task at hand and our memory system can retain the information for future use.

Finally, we need our motor skills (sensory-motor brain fitness) to execute the new golf swing, manipulate our fingers swiftly on the keyboard to play the tune or control the pencil to copy the Math diagram accurately onto our workbook.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these 5 brain fitness systems means understanding the health of our “learning engine”.

Standardised tests

At Brainfit Studio, we use internationally recognized standardized tests to evaluate our students’ brain fitness levels. We are all familiar with the idea of tests in school. A standardised test is another kind of test. It is used to measure a child’s ability in a particular area (in this instance brain fitness) compared to other children of the same age.

Standardised tests are universally conducted and scored in a consistent manner, allowing a wealth of statistical data to be collected. CognitiveMAP™ thus enables us to determine the “fitness level” of a student’s cognitive abilities by comparing his standardised tests scores against the data for his peers. We can then identify which of the 5 brain fitness systems require enhancement and craft a brain fitness programme that addresses this need.

If you want more information all you have to do is contact us at the centre nearest you or attend one of our free parent workshops.