Cognitive Modularity: Implications for Counseling and the Representation of Personal Issues.

Recent modular views of cognition are described and related to counseling approaches. A framework for client-counselor interactions that are based on these views is developed and used to examine ways of expressing and representing counseling issues. The resulting analysis suggests that, for certain counseling activities, spatial-graphic representations are liekly to be useful adjuncts to natural language. Previous work with specialized spatial-graphic approaches (e.g., genograms, behavior loop maps) is reviewed, and a general representational technique, node-link mapping, is introduced.