Cognitive Skill Enhancement in Intellectual Disability

Many labels refer to treatment for cognitive impairments. Most of them are referred to as “cognitive rehabilitation”, “cognitive skills enhancement”, “cognitive empowerment”. Anyway the purpose of these treatments is to help an individual acquire the highest level of cognitive functioning and functional independence possible for that individual. The objectives of the present chapter are to study in depth the latest theoretical approaches to cognitive empowerment in intellectually disabled children and to show that modifiability can be applied despite the presence of severe impairments in the attention, memory, reasoning and language processes of an individual. This chapter begins with a theoretical overview on cognitive empowerment. The first part contains basic principles and theoretical standpoints of cognitive empowerment. Cognitive and biological bases of empowerment will be presented, connected to the concept of “neuroplasticity”. The second part contains operational principles of cognitive empowerment and examples of applications on case studies. Methodologies presented show how to improve attention, memory, thinking, reasoning, and present statistical data that show trends in each of the considered processes.