The article presents a number of specific methodological principles that can be introduced into the system of cognitive education in mathematics lessons. With the help of these principles, the didactic functions of modeling are widely used, individual cognitive abilities are taken into account, the main components of the mental sphere of the student's personality (thinking, memory, attention, motivation) are taken into account.

The creation of a cognitive-visual (visual-cognitive) approach to the formation of knowledge and skills in the process of teaching mathematics makes it possible to maximize the potential of visual thinking. Cognitive abilities are human cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, thinking, imagination, which allow you to process, create, restore information and accumulate it in the form of knowledge and experience. This article discusses the process of teaching mathematics on the basis of a cognitive-visual (visual-cognitive) approach to the formation of knowledge, skills and abilities, which allows you to maximize the possibilities of visual thinking. One of the main rules of this approach is the wide and targeted use of the cognitive function of visualization.

The purpose of this article is to develop the mathematical cognitive abilities of students in the educational process on the basis of theoretical justification and improvement of skills from a practical point of view.

The implementation of the cognitive-visual approach in the process of teaching mathematics to students makes it possible to create a visual learning environment, a set of learning conditions in which the main attention is paid to the use of the student's visual thinking reserves. These conditions presuppose the presence of both traditional visual aids and special means and methods to activate visual work. The cognitive-visual approach is aimed at educating "mathematical vision"; the teacher must constantly take care of the organization of visual information, and the student must learn to analyze this visual information. One of the advantages of the cognitive-visual approach is that it takes into account the individual characteristics of students and, in particular, the peculiarities of the work of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Taking into account the functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres in the practice of teaching mathematics is becoming increasingly relevant today. To solve the problem of improving the cognitive abilities of students, in addition to general mathematical, psychological and pedagogical approaches, taking into account modern achievements, it is necessary to create a general theory of the formation and development of figurative thinking, to develop educational activities on a broader theoretical basis than currently accepted, and a methodological tool. In this regard, reports on the developed methodology for teaching mathematics provide for the organization of the learning process in a visual learning environment, where the teacher does not present the content in finished form, but only regulates the mental and speech activity of students. students, thereby guiding an independent description of new ideas and concepts.