Do we even have a scientifically-backed set of essential biological or cognitive skills related to software engineering?

I would probably start with [1] and [2].

Paper [3] concludes that sex-based differences in risk tolerance tangibly impacted approaches to spatial navigation AND program development.

There's a few others on spatial cognition and mental information processing: [4][5][6]. Paper[5] in particular links spatial cognition to mental modeling, which was identified in [1] as a software engineering skill. And [6] directly connects it to navigating source code.

[1]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eafe/74dddaf7ada62a52a2e712...

[2]https://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A17_Pea_Kur...

[3]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4021352

[4]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

[5]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2729....

[6]https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268852