Page 227 - Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills: A Guide for Professionals

knowledge or higher levels of thinking. Reasoning skills allow analysis of experiences and prediction of future
outcomes. Most behavior results from the cognitive analysis of knowledge, so thoughts are believed to precede
a person’s actions.1

The consumer information processing theory addresses processes by which a consumer takes in and uses
information in decision-making. The theory points out that people have a limited capacity to process, store,
and retrieve information at any one time. In making decisions, they seek only enough information to make a
choice quickly. Thus, information should be organized, limited, and matched to the comprehension level of
the individual, who can then process it with little effort. For example, people may look for the frozen dessert
with the lowest fat content, store the information about their satisfaction with the product, and decide
whether or not to purchase it again. Or, attitudes about a food such as carrots can be diversified to expand a
consumer’s processing of information and application to purchasing patterns.10

To enhance memory and reasoning, teaching requires providing labels for new experiences and structures.
Problems may be treated as cognitive deficits requiring new structures. Clients with defeating self-statements
and cognitive distortions, for example, require cognitive restructuring that rules out the current incorrect
thought and introduces a new one (see Chapter 8).

The practitioner wants people not only to acquire information, skills, and attitudes but also to remember
and use them. Since people are bombarded with information all day long from family, friends, coworkers,
supervisors, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and the Internet, how do they remember it all? They
don’t. Much is immediately discarded.

Children learn from family and peers.
Source: US Department of Agriculture.

Psychologists agree that people must make sense of new information to learn and remember it. Some
information enters working or short-term memory until it is used, such as the time of an appointment; then it
is forgotten. Of course, nothing even enters short-term memory until the person pays attention to it, that is,
focuses on certain stimuli and screens out all others.2 Therefore, the nutrition professional needs to think of
first obtaining and then maintaining a client’s or employee’s attention and focus. Otherwise, the individual
may be thinking about something else.

There are various ways to gain a learner’s attention, such as the use of media, bright colors, raising or

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