Creating hope: Assisting Veterans with Job Search Strategies using Cognitive Information Processing Theory

Providing effective employment services to today's veterans is essential. Given the high unemployment rate that currently exists for the veteran population, it is essential that career development professionals consider ways to effectively address their needs. This article highlights the complexities veterans experience in the job preparation and job search processes, as well as current efforts addressing the veteran unemployment concern. A clinical case study shows how cognitive information processing theory, a theory of career problem solving and decision making, can be used as a foundation for assisting veterans in the job search process.     

Familiarity and categorization processes in memory search

A fundamental distinction in tasks of memory search is whether items receive varied mappings (targets and distractors switch roles across trials) or consistent mappings (targets and distractors never switch roles). The type of mapping often produces markedly different performance patterns, but formal memory-based models that account quantitatively for detailed aspects of the results have not yet been developed and evaluated. Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-retrieval model on its ability to account for memory-search performance involving a wide range of memory-set sizes in both varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) probe-recognition tasks. The model formalized the idea that both familiarity-based and categorization-based processes operate. The model was required to fit detailed response-time (RT) distributions of individual, highly practiced subjects. A key manipulation involved the repetition of negative probes across trials. This manipulation produced a dramatic dissociation: False-alarm rates increased and correct-rejection RTs got longer in VM, but not in CM. The qualitative pattern of results and modeling analyses provided evidence for a strong form of categorization-based processing in CM, in which observers made use of the membership of negative probes in the “new” category to make old–new recognition decisions.