Book
"Crisis in Contexts": Book of Abstract ISCAR Regional Conference
Development of self-dependence as well as a source of human creativity based on «maturing of freedom to act at will» (term of L.S. Vygotsky). Growing up, children can acquire greater opportunities for self-determined examination of new spaces surrounding them and learning about the environment by experiencing the territory and landscape around. The development of children's independence and the sight of the potential avoidance of direct control coming from adults, on the one hand, enables children to visit different places beyond parental control, on the other hand, it creates restrictions and limitations imposed on visiting locations that are considered dangerous by grown-ups. This situation poses an uprise of phenomenon of secret children's worlds. Hidden places are the space where actively promotes the development of their own cognitive initiative, creates new opportunities for playing, designing and other types of children's activity. For example, the dumps provide the opportunity to find the new items and for this novelty, the child is ready to go again and again. Different ways of using the found items develops children's imagination and contributes to the creation of children’s fantasy games. Fantasy games arise in the community of children (7 to 12 years old), last up to several years. They are associated with the allocation of secret spaces hidden from adults. In secrecy from adults the children get a full-fledged opportunity for “maturing of freedom to act at will”. The secret spaces and games make it difficult to access to study this phenomenon. However, we manage to fix children’s hidden places and fantasy games.
The author refl ects upon the book The Sources of cultural-historical psychology: philosophical-humanitarian context by V. Zinchenko, B. Pruzhinin, T. Schedrina. Moscow, 2010.
The chapter discusses convergence in the development of cognitive science (emergence of such new research areas as embodied cognition, embedded cognition, emotional cognition, distributed cognition and new studies in cognitive development) and the fundamental principles of cultural-historical psychology.
The field of cultural-historical psychology originated in the work of Lev Vygotsky and the Vygotsky Circle in the Soviet Union more than eighty years ago, and has now established a powerful research tradition in Russia and the West. The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology is the first volume to systematically present cultural-historical psychology as an integrative/holistic developmental science of mind, brain, and culture. Its main focus is the inseparable unity of the historically evolving human mind, brain, and culture, and the ways to understand it. The contributors are major international experts in the field, and include authors of major works on Lev Vygotsky, direct collaborators and associates of Alexander Luria, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks. The handbook will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of psychology, education, humanities and neuroscience.
The article addresses the views of G. Shpet, L. Vygotsky, M. Bakhtin andothers on art's influence on one's personality andcognitive andaffective spheres. They hadtheir own understanding of the whole issue andof catharsis in particular. The authors focuses on the analysis of inner andouter forms of works of art andassumes that, if reached, the inner form has the strongest influence on man: it enriches andbroadens one's own inner form of active contemplator of work of art.
Art, cultural consciousness, cultural-historical psychology, inner andouter form, Perception, Understanding, catharsis
The article deals with the clauses or preconditions of language and culture acquisition. Following G. G. Shpet, A. A. Uchtomsky, M. Heidegger, N. A. Bernshtein and V. V. Bibikhin, the author qualifies them as «pre-experiential origin». This «origin» is regarded as direct intelligible intuition, spiritual integral, non-differentiated unity: I understand, I think, I can. Spontaneous character of this origin does not mean its primitiveness. Non-mediated pre-experiential origin develops in its differentiation that comes to life in joint activity, in interflowing communication giving birth to multiple forms of culture-mediated behavior. Development of these forms hampers perception and understanding of the world in its immediacy but also enriches these acts. Interchange and interaction of the immediate and the mediated is regarded as a necessary condition of human development and productive activity. The author questions the idea of division psychological functions into natural and cultural (higher), assumed in cultural-historical psychology.
This article describes the expierence of studying factors influencing the social well-being of educational migrants as mesured by means of a psychological well-being scale (A. Perrudet-Badoux, G.A. Mendelsohn, J.Chiche, 1988) previously adapted for Russian by M.V. Sokolova. A statistical analysis of the scale's reliability is performed. Trends in dynamics of subjective well-being are indentified on the basis the correlations analysis between the condbtbions of adaptation and its success rate, and potential mechanisms for developing subjective well-being among student migrants living in student hostels are described. Particular attention is paid to commuting as a factor of adaptation.
The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single- vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.