Disabilities affecting intellectual abilities

There are a variety of disabilities affecting cognitive ability. This is a broad concept encompassing various intellectual or cognitive deficits, including intellectual disability (formerly called mental retardation), deficits too mild to properly qualify as intellectual disability, various specific conditions (such as specific learning disability), and problems acquired later in life through acquired brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.

Many of these disabilities have an effect on memory, which is the ability to recall what has been learned over time. Typically memory is moved from sensory memory to working memory, and then finally into long-term memory. People with cognitive disabilities typically will have trouble with one of these types of memory.^[1]

Living with cognitive disability[edit]

Research documents the importance of providing those with intellectual disabilities alternative spaces and contexts where they feel included and can assert their own definitions of ability and what it is to be "normal."^[8]