Reading involves complex cognitive skills. The word ‘cognitive’ means related to intellectual activities or mental activities like thinking, reasoning, and remembering. Cognitive skills are the brain-based skills that we use to think, learn, remember, reason, etc.
Reading is a mental activity. or mental process. It also evolves cognitive skills that use the brain to think, recall, pay attention, etc. Readers do not merely decode the message. Readers use their brains when reading any material. They make predictions and inferences – they can anticipate any further point based on what they read. For example, readers can form assumptions about the overall content and predict the next level of meaning of the text. That is why reading is called “a psycholinguistic guessing game”. Through the reading process, readers can analyze and assess facts and data to reach a conclusion. Here, each reader has to use cognitive skills like the ability to think, remember, pay attention, memories, etc to reach conclusion or interpretation.