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ON THE DIALECTICS OF COGNITION IN PSYCHOLOGY (TO THE 110-TH ANNIVERSARY OF V. I. LENIN)
M. G. Yaroshevsky
Proceeding from Lenin's ideas concerning ways of development of scientific knowledge and' determination of psychological phenomena, interrelation of the biotropic and sociotropic orientations in psychology is discussed. Basic categories of psychological cognition (image, act, motivation, etc.) were developed in the immediate context of the "dialogue" between those two orientations. The non-productive character of the approaches which tend to ignore this dialectics (understanding of the mind as causa sui, reduction of the psychological reality to either cerebral or social-normative structures, eclecticism as an alternative to the systems approach) is nowadays especially evident. Social process is the original cause of human behavior, however psychological regulation of the latter is realized through neurological mechanisms.
LENIN'S IDEAS ON INTERDEPENDENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY
AND DIALECTICS
V. V. Davydov
V. I. Lenin's philosophical works contain the most fruitful ideas concerning intrinsic relations between psychology and the materialistic dialectics. The dialectical logic has introduced into science the notion of human (life) activity as well as the theory of basic forms of the latter. It is in this theory that psychology finds philosophical grounds for its own ideas on the activity of man. Psychological analysis is properly oriented only in those cases when its products are systematically compared to the contents of logical categories, and particularly to what has already been established in the dialectical-materialistic doctrine of thinking and practical activity.
However in the development of the dialectical logic itself significant role belongs to psychology, and especially to those branches of it which deal with the study of mental development of animals and children. Necessity for the dialectics to use psychological data in order to further develop its categories sets before psychologists a difficult task: to produce a theory of mental development of animals and man. A psychological theory should be considered really completed and developed only when its notions reach the level of philosophical generalizations.
ACTIVITY—MEDIATION THEORY AND THE PROBLEM OF
LEADERSHIP
A. V. Petrovsky
The problem of leadership has been studied in the light of the notion that interpersonal relations in group are determined by the content of the shared activity. The author reviews two basic theories of the nature of the leadership: situational theory and the theory of specific personality traits. Leadership is treated in the article as a form of the subject-subject-object relation, and as a consequence of this approach the author puts forward several hypotheses concerning possible correlations between the type of leadership and the results of the sociometric and reference-metric decisions.
GROUP LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS
R. L. Kritchevsky
Some data obtained in an empirical study of the leadership dynamics in a temporary youth collective are presented. It is shown that the group leadership dynamics is determined by the step-by-step development of the intra-group process of exchange of values. Cause-effect analysis of two basic components of the exchange: value contribution, and status—revealed that the first of them is the original one. It has been also shown that different aspects of group leadership develop unevenly as a result of the hierarchical structure of activities performed by the group.
INTELLIGENCE.TESTS IN PSYCHOLOGY
Ê. Ì. Gourevitch
Diagnostic procedures and problems used in psychological testing show to what extent the subjects belong to the culture represented in the tests. There are no tests which are free of culture; the latter represents historically determined spiritual and material life circumstances of a corresponding social community. It is in the ontogenesis that a man acquires the cultural-social (national, class, occupational, etc.) features of his community, gets enrooted into the culture and contributes by his activity to its further development. Scientifically grounded construction of tests, and particularly of verbal tests, must be based on a predetermined system of thesauri corresponding to every age period and every educational level. Tests of this type not only will reflect the interplay of general and individual features of psychological growth, they will also become tools of control over this growth. The author concludes with the statement of utter necessity to revise the methodological principles of testing.
FUNCTIONAL ASYMMETRY OF THE HEMISPHERES AS RELATED
TO THE PROBLEM OF CEREBRAL ORGANIZATION
OF EMOTIONS IN MAN
I. A. Pereverzeva
The author reviews those aspects of the problem of cerebral organization of emotions which concern functional asymmetry of the brain's hemispheres Ñorresponding researches are characterized by inconsistency of results and conclusions and may be split into three groups. Analysis of the experimental data shows that toe inconsistency of the data results from :inconsistency of the methods and, most important,. from inconsistency of the subject-matter. In the author's view further study of the problem should be based on the approach developed in Soviet neuropsychology by A.R. Luria, winch separates studies of emotions, of elements of emotive
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process, and of the interrelations between them, and which assumes that hemispheres differently participate in realization of different stages, of an emotive act.
RESULTS OF THE INVESTIGATION OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
B. S. Muchnik
1. In order to control effectively mental activity of a writer in the process of generating texts for various purposes it is useful to employ as impact signals not models and not single demonstrations of how to or not to construct a text, but general methods of action (rules, techniques) which are to a large extent alienated from a particular language material. 2. Rules of psychologic stylistics can be best deduced not through the study of mental activity of a text creating person, but through the study of a reader perceiving this text. 3. To reveal general regularities of semantic perception of the text from which the stylistic rules are deduced it is advisable that readers be offered texts provoking a misunderstanding of meaning. 4. Classification of stylistic mistakes should be based not on a uniform grammatical construction, but on a uniform mental operation. 5. To give the text an adequate evaluation it is necessary to consider it from two points of-view—that of the reader and that of the writer. With the author's intention should be compared results of the primary and not of the final perception of the text on the basis of general regularities of semantic perception of texts.
The theory under investigation has various practical applications: for development of writing abilities, for creation of text-books, etc.
ROLE OF REACTIVE IMPRESSIONABILITY
V. S. Yurkevitch
Need for cognition is interpreted by the author as the desire to obtain new knowledge. Three levels of development of the need for cognition are distinguished in the paper: level of the need for impressions, level of the inquiring curiosity, and level of the goal-directed activity. With the help of methods specially developed by the author for this purpose the role of initial impressionability in the development of higher levels of the need for cognition was studied. It has been found out that in adolescents curiosity requires for its development an optimal level of impressionability. An additional study revealed increased need for impressions in mentally passive children. It is suggested therefore to treat mental laziness as the inadequacy of the available level of the need for cognition to the age of the child.
STUDY OF VOLITIONAL ACTIVITY IN SCHOOLCHILDREN AS RELATED TO PECULIARITIES OF PRODUCTIVE THINKING
V. V. Kalin, V. I. Pantchenko
The authors established positive correlation between the quality of thinking and the level of volitional activity of schoolchildren in learning. In the absence of an adequate help to a schoolchild with a qualitatively
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defective thinking directed at the organization of his thinking in situations of enforced activity, there necessarily develops in him a lack of will. However properly developed productive thinking is not the only factor responsible for proper development of volition in schoolchildren—a number of other factors has been also revealed in the study. The authors also provide descriptions of how different combinations of thinking and volition are manifested in the behavior of schoolchildren, as well as some recommendations concerning individual ways of stimulation of volitional activity.
INFLUENCE OF MOTIVATION ON COGNITIVE AND OPERATIONAL
COMPONENTS OF ACTIVITY
V. N. Abramova
The author provides an analytical procedure for the study of the goal-acceptance process in learning activity. The procedure is based on V.P. Zinchenko, Î.Ê. Tikhomirov and A.G. Asmolov's ideas on the structure of activity. In the process of goal-acceptance, i. e. in the process of development of a subjective goal, which takes place in a subject when he has been presented with a task to perform, the author studied intentional components of activity (different kinds of sets and motivation) and their relations with cognitive components (ideas about the nature and goals of the task, and about means to perform it).
The author studied also how the efficiency of learning activity depends on the type of leading motivation and on the subjective idea of the activity's goal.
ON SOME PECULIARITIES OF IMAGINATION DEVELOPMENT IN
PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN
O. M. D'yatchenko, A. I. Kirillova
The paper deals with the study of development of creative imagination in pre-school children. It has been shown that the degree of originality of imagination depends on the way the mental images are manipulated. The highest originality has been observed in those subjects who freely used elements of earlier images to construct new images. This type of performance of imagination tasks appears by the end of the pre-school age and its development can be provoked by means of special teaching methods.
ON THE THEORY OF LEARNING-EDUCATIONAL SELF-ACTIVITY
L. M. Fridman
The problem of types of man's generic life activity is discussed. An activity is considered generic if it is inherent in a particular stage of man's ontogenesis and if it is a universal and necessary form of activity at this stage without which man can not live and develop normally; at the same time outwardly this activity appears to be non-motivated and can be perceived as self-activity. Nowadays play activity of the pre-school age belongs to this category. In the future communist society it will be joined
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by the working activity. A hypothesis is put forward that learning activity will also be a generic life activity. It will happen as soon as the idea that the general education is a natural need necessary for normal development of every human being wins the public consciousness, and as soon as education stops being a means of personal profit or reward. The paper is concluded with the statement of necessity to develop within pedagogical psychology a general theory of man's learning activity as a generic kind of his life activity.
ACQUISITION OF GENERALIZED IMAGES AND EMPLOYMENT OF THEM
IN LEARNING
L. G. Ivanova
Experimental teaching procedure assured both acquisition by the students of generalized images related to methods of instruction and active production of those images (based on independent selection of foundations for such production). Generalized images related to instructional methods facilitate the transfer of them. Employment of a generalized image as a basis for a generalized method of learning enables the students to use widely the variants of operations which constitute the method.
RECOGNITION AND TYPOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
V. A. Souzdaleva
The author studied individual differences in the speed of recognition of three simultaneously displayed geometrical shapes. The displayed set of shapes could either coincide with the standard one or be different from it in one, two or three shapes. In the first case (coincidence) the subjects were to say "Yes", in the second (any deviation from the standard)—to say "No". It has been found out that subjects responded to each experimental situation within individually—characteristic speed limits; at that the speed of their responses directly correlated with the speed characteristics of their typological properties: persons with well expressed lability and mobility of nervous processes recognized more quickly and accurately while persons with low indices (so-called "inert" subjects) performed more slowly and less accurately. There was an exception however: the "inerts" recognized more quickly negative displays with a faulty central shape. In the author's view this fact is a manifectation of the ability on the part of some persons to compensate for the natural slowness of the recongnition operations by the employment of an individual recognition strategy.
THE DEGREE OF SPATIAL UNIFICATION
OF CEREBRAL EVOKED POTENTIALS
AS AN INDEX OF MAN'S FUNCTIONAL STATE
Ye. Yu. Artemieva, L. G. Dikaya, L. A. Samoilovitch
The paper deals with the study of dynamics of the spatial patterns of averaged evoked potentials (AEP) as a function of man's functional state. The authors proceed from the idea of the systemic localization of
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psychological functions and from P.K. Anokhin's theory according to which separate components of AEP represent activity of different structures (or functional systems) of the brain which participate in processing of sensory information.
ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE "INSENSITIVITY" ZONE IN THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE OBJECT OF CONTROL ON THE QUALITY OF TRACING PERFORMANCE
V. G. Zazykin, A. P. Tchernyshev
The paper presents results of an experimental study of the efficiency with which an operator performs a tracking task under conditions when a non-linear object is included into the structure of control. Criteria for the assessment of the quality of tracking has been developed, and certain regularities of their modifications due to changes in the values of some parameters of the object under control has been established. The experimenters provide also psychological analysis of the operator's activity in controlling a non-linear object.
SOME PROBLEMS OF TEACHING AFTER SAMPLES
Ye. D. Bozhovitch
Some conflicting views on the role of samples in teaching are discussed in the paper. The problem of development of an operation after a sample is very wide and not yet sufficiently studied. In particular it is not clear yet which psychological processes are operative in the problem-solving of this type. To explain it through imitation or mechanical copying would lead to closing of the problem rather than to finding an answer. In the author's view proper solution of the problem requires first of all establishment of a system of specifications which a particular sample should meet, as well as elaboration of a system of methodological tools (instructions, types of tasks, etc.) into which it should be incorporated.
PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES
OF THE SENSORY—PERCEPTUAL PROCESS
IN NORM AND IN HYSTERICAL PSYCHOPATHY
V. B. Streletz
The paper presents an analysis of neurophysiological mechanisms of perception based on the study of somatic-sensory evoked potentials of the brain registered in the process of performing a perceptual task. 20 healthy and 19 hysterical subjects were studied. It has been shown that different components of evoked potentials contain different types of stimulus information and correlate with three consecutive stages of the sensory-perceptual process. It has been established that hysterical psychopathy is accompanied by weakness of sensory systems and by disturbances , in the final, third, stage of the sensory-perceptual process (electrophysiologically this stage is represented by the P300-wave).
INDIVIDUAL APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL—SOCIAL ACTIVITY IN ADOLESCENTS
T. N. Kozintzeva
The article describes a successful attempt to develop active collective attitude to the organizational-social activity in adolescent pupils of a boarding school by means of a method based on systematic use of the individual approach in the process of teaching-educational work and on the assessment of relations between the pupils which had been established before the experimental work started.
ON THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL CONTENT OF THE PROPERTTY OF LABILITY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
V. M. Russalov, L. N. Kotov
In 67 subjects indices of the property of lability in the visual and auditory analyzers were compared with amplitude-frequency background EEC characteristics of the frontal and occipital derivations (on the right side) as well as with the indices of spatio-temporal synchronization of the EEG-processes of the frontal and occipital derivations. It was found that the indices of lability do not correlate with amplitude-frequency EEG characteristics, but they do show a significant positive relationship with the level of spatio-temporal synchronization of the EEG-processes. A conclusion was made that one of the possible neuroprysiological bases of the property of lability is the level of intercentral relations between different regions of the human brain.