There is an old adage, “Give people a fish and they eat for a day, but teach them how to fish and they eat for a lifetime.” This wise maxim succinctly captures the ultimate aim in using the cognitive information processing (CIP) approach to career counseling: to enable individuals to become skillful career problem solvers
The term “goal” refers to a future state of affairs that a person wishes to attain or maintain. Goals prompt planning, which, in turn, serves as the basis for action. From these simple premises, it is apparent that the core function of goals is to regulate behavior and that communicative goals and plans fall under
Cognitive restructuring is a technique that is commonly taught to athletes by sport psychologists in which self-defeating thoughts and negative self-statements are identified and substituted with positive, adaptive self-statements, and coping thoughts. Cognitive restructuring was originally developed in clinical settings and has since been used by practitioners in various contexts (including sport) to address a
The body of work on aging and information processing has consistently indicated that, generally, cognitive performance deteriorates with age (Park & Minear 2004). Measures of speed, reasoning, and working memory all indicate a negative trend for age. Although these findings may seem bleak, there are some domains that remain intact. For instance, knowledge seems to
Cognitive task analysis (CTA) refers to a suite of scientific methods designed to identify the cognitive skills, strategies, and knowledge required to perform tasks proficiently. The goal of CTA is to use this information to improve instruction, training, and technological design (e.g., decision aids) for the purposes of making work more efficient, productive, satisfying, and
In the domain of sport, the term cognitive capabilities refers to the athlete’s aptitude to process, evaluate, select, and compare information. Cognitive capabilities are encompassed in the cognitive system and serve as a linkage between the perceptual and motor systems. Thus, these assume the role of interpreters, translating environmental stimuli into meaningful patterns for further
Broadly defined, cognition refers to mental operations involving information processing and thus includes processes such as perception, problem solving, memory recall, and decision making. The term cognitive styles refers to the different approaches people characteristically use in undertaking cognitive tasks. Considered to be a personality trait and representing both nature and nurture effects, cognitive styles
Theories of human behavior differ in their conceptions of human nature and what they regard as the basic determinants and mechanisms governing self-development, adaptation, and change. Social cognitive theory is rooted in an agentic perspective. To be an agent is to influence one’s own functioning and events that affect one’s life. In this view people
Cognitive ethology is the study of higher mental functions in animals. Until about 1980, the possibility of cognitive powers in animals was largely denied. This aversion to thinking about the animal mind was rooted in the deeply embarrassing “Clever Hans” incident. In the early 1900s, a horse known as “Clever Hans” was apparently taught language
Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed in the late 1950s by US psychologist Leon Festinger, which claims that people tend to avoid information and situations that are likely to increase a dissonance with their existing cognitions, such as beliefs, attitudes, or other value judgments. The author proposed the following basic hypotheses: “(1) The existence of