Cognitive Fitness Framework: Selecting and Training for High Performance

Performance psychology is rapidly expanding into a growing range of applications - from firefighters and emergency medicine, to sport, performing arts, and the military. These user groups share a common focus on striving for superior performance in challenging tasks under stressful conditions. What it takes to sustain performance under pressure is remarkably common across these occupations. The factors contributing to such performance go beyond mere ‘wellness’ (i.e., the absence of pathology) and include – apart from knowledge and skills – a range of ‘capacity’ factors, such as strength, endurance, and flexibility, that are best summarized by the concept of ‘fitness’. This symposium will introduce the Cognitive Fitness Framework (CF2; Aidman, 2020) developed to assemble the key drivers of cognitive performance across these multiple domains. By integrating the concepts of mental fitness (Seligman, 2008), cognitive readiness (Grier, 2012; Crameri et al., 2021) and the growing consensus on key domains of cognitive functioning (RDoC; Morris and Cuthbert, 2012; Yücel et al., 2019), the CF2 enables neuroscience evidence to inform high performance applications, some of which will be presented by symposium speakers. The symposium will showcase an RDoC-derived expert consensus developed over a set of cognitive primaries such as self-awareness, inhibition control, task switching, and cognitive flexibility and a prototype program to train them as the enablers of the development of cognitive skills, from remembering and problem solving to job-specific competencies and more complex fitness attributes such as frustration tolerance and resistance to distraction