The purpose of the current study is to determine pre-service primary school teachers' cognitive structure regarding communication, cooperation and decision-making skills, which are among the basic life skills addressed in the Life Sciences curriculum. The study employed qualitative research method. The study group of was composed of 111 pre-service primary school teachers taking the course "Life Sciences Teaching" at the Department of Primary School Teacher Training in a state university located in the Marmara region of Turkey. A word association test prepared to test the skills addressed in the current study was used as the data collection tool. This word association test focused on three of the basic life skills; communication, cooperation and decision-making skills. By examining the words written by the pre-service primary school teachers related to these three skills in a detailed manner, a frequency table showing how many times the concepts were repeated was prepared and on the basis of the cut-off points, concept maps were developed. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the pre-service primary school teachers produced a total of 154 concepts in relation to the three skills. When the concepts most frequently produced by the pre-service primary school teachers were examined, it was found that "human" was the concept most frequently produced for the communication skill, "group" was the concept most frequently produced for the cooperation skill and "reaching a conclusion" was the concept most frequently produced for the decision-making skill.