As we indicated in our last blog, we think that semantic memory is where occupational information is stored while episodic memory is where information about the self is stored. \u00a0This dichotomy represents the foundation of the Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) approach to career decision-making (Peterson, Sampson, Lenz & Reardon, 2002).\u00a0 In this theory, episodic memory, defined as the memory of autobiographical events which include attributes such as time, place, people and associated emotions, is believed to be the recalled material from which we derive a sense of self.\u00a0 All the little mental \u201cmovies\u201d of our lives that we can recall (and some that we can\u2019t recall) help to create a picture of self in our world.\u00a0 As such, experience plays a key role in this aspect of memory.<\/p>\n
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When I was going to school in Alberta as a young 17-year-old, I remember hearing a series of lectures delivered by a psychologist from Washington State.\u00a0 I can recall being enthralled by all that he had to say because for the first time in my academic life something I was learning made complete sense to me.\u00a0 Of course these events coincided with an important period in the development of my identity but this experience in particular seemed to tie together a number of loose areas of self-awareness residing in my episodic memory.\u00a0 His words about human development made all of my previous work as a summer camp counsellor make sense.\u00a0 His insights into the difficulties people have with daily functioning rang true to my experiences in high school.\u00a0 The combination of the feeling of \u201cgetting it\u201d and the satisfaction that this experience brought caused me to think that I had finally found an area in which I could excel.\u00a0 I began to identify my sense of who I was with the world of psychology.\u00a0 The experience resulted in my seeing myself in a particular way and I would suggest it helped me develop self-concepts about what I was good at (understanding humans from this perspective) and what I valued (helping people to function in a healthy way).\u00a0 Those self-concepts have persisted into adulthood and have helped to lead me in my present career direction.<\/p>\n
Most theories of self-concept judgment assume that the individual has a database of experiences from which trait judgments can be made.\u00a0 Episodic memory records events with conscious awareness that “this happened to me”.\u00a0 We also believe that semantic memory enables people to retrieve general facts about their personal past in summary form. Although these summary representations are about the self and, we believe, have been abstracted from episodic memories of the self, the semantic facts about self do not preserve a record of the events from which they were derived. Klein, Sherman, and Loftus (1996) conducted an interesting study that asked first year college students to access memory to recall a specific incident or to decide if a presented trait described them, either at college or in the time they were living at home.\u00a0 They found that when trait-relevant experience is low, self-knowledge regarding that trait is represented episodically because too few behaviors have been encountered to support the formation of semantic trait representations.\u00a0 As trait-relevant behavioral experience increases, people no longer require behavioral episodes to make trait judgments about self.\u00a0 We might draw the conclusion from this study that each new experience we have adds to our network of concepts and, with repetition, contributes to the overall organization of knowledge about self in memory.\u00a0 Our next entry will look at the ways we believe concepts are created, organized and, ultimately, become useful in making career decisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By: Jeff Landine and John Stewart<\/p>\n
References<\/p>\n
Klein, S. B., Sherman, J. W., & Loftus, J. (1996). The role of episodic and semantic memory in\u00a0the development of trait self-knowledge. Social Cognition, 14<\/em>(4), 277-291.<\/p>\n Peterson, G. W., Sampson, J. P. Jr., Lenz, J. G., & Reardon, R. C. (2002).\u00a0 A cognitive information processing approach to career problem solving and decision-making. \u00a0In As we indicated in our last blog, we think that semantic memory is where occupational information is stored while episodic memory is where information about the self is stored. \u00a0This dichotomy represents the foundation of the Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) approach to career decision-making (Peterson, Sampson, Lenz & Reardon, 2002).\u00a0 In this theory, episodic memory, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001010,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[248],"class_list":["post-5335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careercounselling","tag-john-stewart"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nD. Brown and Associates (Eds.), Career choice and development<\/em> (4th<\/sup> ed.) (pp. 312-372). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"