Development of perception and understanding. Development of the infant's perception. III. Junior school age
Perception is a process that forms the image of objects and phenomena from the surrounding world into the structures of the psyche. This is a complete reflection of the qualities and inherent characteristics of an object and phenomenon. This is a kind of collapsed thinking. It is often interpreted not as a process, but as a result, that is, the image of the object itself. Perception is synonymous with perception, therefore the image of an object is formed with the help of the perception of primary sensations, certain knowledge, desires, expectations, imagination and mood. The main features of perception are objectivity, constancy, integrity, apperception, structure, meaningfulness, illusion, selectivity.
Perception has many synonyms: apperception, perception, evaluation, understanding, acceptance, contemplation.
Perception in psychology
Perception in psychology is a process of display characteristic properties objects and phenomena in the psyche, when the sense organs are directly influenced. There was a long hour of discussion regarding sensations and their importance in perception. Associative psychology interpreted sensations as basic elements of the psyche. Philosophy criticized the idea that perception is built from sensations. In the 20th century, some changes occurred in psychology; perception is no longer considered as a set of atomic sensory sensations, but began to be understood as a structural and holistic phenomenon. Psychologist J. Gibson interprets perception as an active process of appropriating information from the world, which includes a real examination of the information that is perceived. Thus, this process shows a person the properties of the surrounding world related to his needs, and demonstrates his possible activities in the actual real situation.
Another psychologist W. Nesser insisted that perception in psychology is the process of extracting information from objects of the external world, which is carried out on the basis of schemes of various objects and the whole world that exist in the subject. These patterns are learned through experience, and there are also underlying themes that are innate. A similar idea was held by supporters of cognitive psychology, who believe that perception is the process of categorizing perceived information, that is, assigning perceived objects to a certain category of objects. Some categories are innate - this is information about the surrounding nature and the closest objects that a child is able to correlate with some category, and there are categories that include objects, knowledge about which is gained through experience.
In the human mind, the reflection occurs through a direct influence on the analyzers.
Methods of perception depend on the system that will be affected. Through perception, people can become aware of what is happening to them and how the world affects them.
This process was previously described as the summation of certain sensations, or a consequence of elementary associations of individual properties. Still, there remains a part of psychologists who consider perception as a set of sensations that appear as a result of direct sensory cognition, which are interpreted as subjective experiences of the quality, localization, strength and other properties of the influence of stimuli.
This definition is incorrect, so contemporaries describe this process as a reflection of whole objects or phenomena. Selects from a complex of influencing stimuli (shape, color, weight, taste, etc.) the most basic ones, while simultaneously distracting from unimportant stimuli. It also combines groups of significant features and compares the perceived complex of signs with previously known knowledge about the subject.
When perceiving familiar objects, their recognition occurs very quickly; a person simply combines two or three properties into a whole and comes to the desired decision. When unfamiliar, new objects are perceived, their recognition is much more complex and occurs in broader forms. As a result of the analytical-synthetic process, essential features are identified that do not allow others to reveal themselves, insignificant and combining perceived elements are linked into a single whole, and a complete perception of the object arises.
Process of perception is complex, active, and requires significant analytical and synthetic work. This nature of perception is expressed in many signs that require special consideration.
The process of perception has motor components with the help of which the perception of information is realized (eye movement, feeling objects). Therefore, this process would be more accurately defined as perceptual activity.
The process of perception is never limited to one modality, but has a well-coordinated relationship between several analyzers, as a result of which ideas that have formed in the individual appear. It is very important that the perception of objects never occurs at an elementary level, but operates at the highest levels of the psyche.
When a person has a watch in front of his eyes, he mentally names this object, not paying attention to unimportant properties (color, shape, size), but highlights the main property - indicating the time. He also classifies this object into the appropriate category, isolates it from other objects that are similar in appearance, but those that belong to a completely different category, for example, in in this case, barometer. This confirms that the process of perceiving a person by psychological structure close to visual thinking. An active and complex character determines its characteristics, which in to the same degree apply to all forms.
Peculiarities of perception constitute the main characteristic of perceived objects. They are also properties of these objects, phenomena and objects.
Peculiarities of perception: objectivity, integrity, structure, constancy, comprehension, apperception.
The objectivity of perception is observed in the attribution of knowledge acquired from the outside world to this world. Performs regulatory and orienting functions in practical activities. It is created on the basis of external motor processes that ensure contact with the object. Without movement, perception would not have a relationship with the objects of the world, that is, the property of objectivity. It also plays a role in regulating the subject’s behavior. Usually objects are defined not by their appearance, but according to their practical purpose or basic property.
Constancy is defined in the relative constancy of properties in objects, even if their conditions change. With the help of the compensating property of constancy, the subject is able to perceive objects as relatively stable. For example, constancy in the perception of colors is the relative immutability of visible color under the influence of lighting. Color constancy is also determined by certain reasons, among them: adaptation to the level of brightness in the visual field, contrast, ideas about natural color and its lighting conditions.
The constancy of size perception is expressed in the relative constancy of the visible dimensions of an object at different distances. If an object is relatively close to the distance, its perception is determined by the action of additional factors, of particular importance among them is the effort of the eye muscles, which adapt to fixing the object while moving it away at different distances.
The perception of the shape of objects, their constancy is expressed in the relative stability of its perception when their positions change relative to the line of sight of the observing subject. During any change in the position of an object in relation to the eyes, its image shape on the retina changes, with the help of eye movements along the contours of objects and the selection of characteristic combinations of contour lines known to the subject from past experience.
A study of the evolution of the origin of the constancy of perception of people leading their lifestyle in a dense forest, not seeing objects at various distances, only around them. They perceive objects located at a far distance as small, not distant. For example, builders can see objects below without distorting their size.
The source of the property of constancy of perception is the actions of the perceptual system of the brain. When a person repeatedly perceives the same objects in different conditions, the stability of the perceptual image of the object is ensured, relative to changeable conditions and movements of the perceiving receptor apparatus itself. Consequently, the approach to constancy stems from a kind of self-regulating action, which has a feedback mechanism and adapts to the characteristics of the object, the conditions and circumstances of its existence. If a person lacked constancy of perception, he would not be able to navigate the constant variability and diversity of the surrounding world.
The integrity of perception provides greater information content, in contrast to sensations that reflect individual characteristics of an object. Integrity is formed on the basis of general knowledge about its individual properties and characteristics of an object, taken in the form of sensations. The elements of sensation are very strongly connected with each other and the only complex image of an object arises when a person is under the direct influence of some properties or parts of the object. The impressions from this arise as conditioned reflex as a result of the connection between visual and tactile influence, which was formed in life experience.
Perception is not a simple summation of human sensations, and does not respond to them instantly. The subject perceives a generalized structure actually isolated from sensations, which is formed during a certain time. When a person listens to music, the rhythms he heard will continue to sound in his head when a new rhythm arrives. He who listens to music perceives its structure holistically. The last note heard cannot form the basis of such an understanding; the whole structure of the melody continues to be played in the head with various interrelations of the elements it includes. Integrity and structure lie in the properties of reflected objects.
Human perception has a very close connection with thinking. Therefore, the peculiarity of meaningful perception will play a very important role. Although the process of perception arises under the influence of direct influence on the senses, perceptual images always have semantic meaning.
Conscious perception of objects helps a person mentally name the object and assign it to a designated category or group. When a person encounters a new object for the first time, he tries to establish some similarity with already familiar objects. Perception is a constant search for the best description of the available data. How an object is perceived by a person depends on the stimulus, its characteristics, and the person himself. Since a living whole person perceives, and not individual organs (eyes, ears), therefore the process of perception is always influenced by the specific characteristics of the individual.
The dependence of perception on the influence of mental characteristics of a person’s life, on the properties of the subject’s personality itself, is called apperception. If subjects are presented with unfamiliar objects, then in the first phases of their perception, they will look for standards in relation to which the object that is being presented can be attributed. During perception, hypotheses regarding the belonging of an object to a certain category are put forward and subject to testing. Thus, during perception, traces from past experience and knowledge are used. Therefore one object can be perceived different people differently.
Types of perception
There are several classifications of types of perception. First, the perception is divided into intentional (voluntary) or intentional (voluntary).
Intentional perception has an orientation with the help of which it regulates the process of perception - this is to perceive an object or phenomenon and become familiar with it.
Arbitrary perception can be included in some activity and realized in the process of its activity.
Unintentional perception does not have such a clear focus, and the subject is not given the goal of perceiving a specific object. The direction of perception is influenced by external circumstances.
As an independent phenomenon, perception manifests itself in observation. Observation is a deliberate, systematic and long-term perception over a certain period of time, aimed at tracking the course of some phenomenon or changes occurring in the object of perception.
Observation is an active form of human sensory cognition of reality. During observation, as an independent purposeful activity, from the very beginning there is a verbal formulation of tasks and goals that orient the observation process towards certain objects. If you practice observation for a long time, you can develop such a property as observation - the ability to notice characteristic, subtle features and details of objects that do not immediately catch the eye.
To develop observation skills, an organization of perception is necessary that meets the necessary conditions of success, clarity of the task, activity, preliminary preparation, systematicity, and planning. Observation is necessary in all spheres of human life. Already from childhood, in the process of playing or learning, it is necessary to place emphasis on the development of observation, versatility and accuracy of perception.
There is a classification of perceptions according to: modality (visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, gustatory) and forms of perception of the existence of matter (spatial, temporal, motor).
Visual perception is the process of creating a visual image of the world based on sensory information perceived through the visual system.
Auditory perception- this is a process that ensures the receptivity of sounds and orientation according to them in the environment, carried out using an auditory analyzer.
Tactile perception– based on multimodal information, the leading among which is tactile.
Olfactory perception- this is the ability to sense and distinguish odorous substances as odors.
Taste perception– perception of stimuli acting on the receptors of the mouth, characterized by taste sensations (sweet, salty, bitter, sour).
More complex forms of perception are the perception of space, movement and time.
Space is formed by the perception of shape, size, location and distance.
Visual perception of space is based on the perception of the size and shape of an object, thanks to the synthesis of visual, muscular, tactile sensations, perception of volume, distance of objects, which is carried out by binocular vision.
A person perceives movement because it occurs against a specific background, which allows the retina to display in a certain sequence the resulting changes in positions that are in motion relative to the elements in front of and behind which the object is moving. There is an autokinetic effect when in the dark a luminous stationary point appears to move.
Perception of time researched a little less, since there are many difficulties in this process. The difficulty in explaining how a person perceives time is that there is no obvious physical stimulus in the perception. The duration of objective processes, that is, physical time can be measured, but duration itself is not a stimulus in the literal sense of the word. There is no energy in time that would act on a certain temporary receptor, for example, as is observed in the influence of light or sound waves. To date, no mechanism has been discovered that indirectly or directly converts physical time intervals into corresponding sensory signals.
Perception of information- this is an active, semi-conscious process of the subject’s activity in receiving and processing significant knowledge about the surrounding world, events and people.
The perception of information is carried out under the influence of certain circumstances. Firstly, the situation in which the information was acquired matters. A favorable situation will promote a more favorable perception than the information is worth, and conversely, an unfavorable situation will promote a negative perception of the information than it actually is.
Secondly, the depth of understanding of the situation. A person who is well versed in the situation in most cases is calmer about information, related events and the people around him at that moment. He does not dramatize what is happening, does not exalt, and assesses the situation very adequately than a person with a limited outlook.
Thirdly, the perception of information is influenced by the characteristics of the phenomenon, subject or object that the information indicates.
Fourthly, stereotypes (simplified standardized representations of complex phenomena and objects of the surrounding reality) have a great influence. Stereotypes are an idea based on the views of others about those things that a person has not yet encountered, but may encounter and, thus, facilitate his understanding of these things.
Fifthly, perception often becomes more difficult, under the influence of unpredictability or distortion of information, the inability to correctly present information.
Person's perception by person
When people meet for the first time, they, perceiving each other, highlight features of appearance that represent their mental and social qualities. Particular attention is paid to posture, gait, gestures, cultural speech, behavioral patterns, habits, and manners. One of the first and most important is professional characteristics, social status, communication and moral qualities, how angry or warm-hearted a person is, sociable or uncommunicative, and others. Individual facial features are also selectively highlighted.
The characteristics of a person are interpreted by their appearance accordingly in several ways. The emotional way is expressed in the fact that social qualities are attributed to a person, depending on his appearance and aesthetic appeal. If a person is outwardly beautiful, then he is good. Very often people fall for this trick; it is worth remembering that appearances can be deceiving.
The analytical method assumes that each element of appearance is associated with a specific mental property characteristic of this person. For example, frowning eyebrows, compressed lips, and a frowning nose indicate an angry person.
The perceptual-associative method consists of attributing to a person qualities in which he seems similar to another person.
The social-associative method assumes that a person is assigned qualities of a certain social type in relation to his individual external signs. Such a generalized image of a person influences communication with this person. People often identify a person without a fixed place of residence by torn clothes, dirty pants, torn worn-out shoes and try to keep their distance from him.
The perception of a person by a person lends itself to social stereotypes, measures, and standards. The idea of the social status of an individual, the general idea of him, is transferred to other manifestations of this personality, this is the halo effect. The primacy effect suggests that the initial perceived information heard from other people about a person can influence the perception of him when meeting him, will be of predominant importance.
The effect of social distance is generated by significant differences in the social status of people in communication. An extreme manifestation of this effect can be expressed in a disdainful, hateful attitude towards representatives with different social status.
The evaluation and feelings of people during their perception of each other are very multifaceted. They can be divided into: conjunctive, that is, uniting, and disjunctive, that is, separating feelings. Disjunctive ones are generated by what is condemned in that environment. Conjunctive – favorable.
Development of perception in children
In development, children's perceptions have specific features. From birth, he already has some information. The further development of this process is the result of the child’s personal activity. How active he is, how quickly he develops, gets acquainted with various objects and people.
Parents can control their children's perceptions in the future. The early development of the properties of perception occurs as the child grows up; it manifests itself in the peculiarity that for the perceiving child the shape of an object becomes significant, it gains meaning. In infancy, recognition of people and objects around a person develops, and the number of purposeful, conscious body movements increases. Such activity in the development of perception occurs before primary school age.
It is very important that before this time a study is carried out for possible perception disorders. The reason for the anomaly in the development of an understanding of reality may be a breakdown in the connection between the sensory systems and the brain centers to which the signal is received. This could happen in case of injury or morphological changes in the body.
The perception of children of primary school age is expressed by vagueness and indistinctness. For example, children do not recognize people dressed in costumes at holidays, even though their faces may be open. If children see a picture of an unfamiliar object, they select one element from this image, based on which they comprehend the entire object. This understanding is called syncretism, it is inherent in children's perception.
In middle preschool age, ideas about the relationship between the sizes of objects appear. The child can judge familiar things as large or small, regardless of their relationship to other objects. This is observed in the child’s ability to arrange toys “according to height.”
Children of senior preschool age already have an understanding of the measurements of the size of objects: width, length, height, space. They are able to distinguish the location of objects among themselves (top, bottom, left, right, and so on).
The child’s productive activity lies in his ability to perceive and reproduce the features of objects, their color, size, shape, location. In this case, it is important to assimilate sensory standards and also develop special perceptual actions.
The perception of works of art by children of senior preschool age expresses the unity of experience and cognition. The child learns to capture the image and perceive the feelings that excite the author.
The peculiarity of the child’s perception of the people around him is revealed in value judgments. The highest and brightest assessment is attributed to those adults who have a close connection with the child.
The perception and evaluation of other children depends on the child's popularity in the group. The higher the child's position, the more highly appreciated attributed to him.
The development of perception in preschool children is a complex, multifaceted process that helps the child learn to more accurately reflect the world around him, be able to distinguish the features of reality and be able to successfully adapt to it. 
Perception is a person’s reflection of an object or phenomenon as a whole with its direct impact on the senses. Perception, as a sensation, is connected, first of all, with the analytical apparatus through which the world influences nervous system person. Perception is a set of sensations. Thus, perceiving a fresh, ruddy, round, fragrant apple, a person reflects its color, smell in sensations, feels its heaviness, elasticity, and its smooth surface.
However, perception is more than the sum of the sensations received from the same object. Perceiving an apple, a person knows that it is an apple, that it has a characteristic taste, that it can be eaten, that it is a fruit. A person always denotes a perceived object with a specific word - “apple”, which denotes not any specific color, taste, shape or smell, but the entire object as a whole. “To perceive a chair means to see an object in which you can sit,” wrote the French psychologist P. Janet, “but to perceive a house,” Weizsacker said, “it means to see not an image that “entered” the eye, but on the contrary, recognize an object that can be entered.”
When perceiving something, a person has in mind a relationship of parts as a whole that is familiar to him and relatively constant for a given category of things.
The perception of an object as a complex object requires the analytical-synthetic function of the cortex. The object as a whole must be highlighted against the background of all other things. To do this, the object must already be familiar to the person, he must know a certain group of objects to which the given one belongs, there must be a known word denoting this group of objects. Thus, a word, being the name of a given specific thing, gives a person knowledge of what he perceives.
The mechanism of the perception process is much more complex than sensations. It is clear that the development of this cognitive process in a child occurs somewhat differently than the development of sensitivity and motor skills.
Modern psychology does not consider it as a process of instantaneous imprint of an object perceived by a person on the retina of his eye or in the cortex of his brain. Perception is a process related in origin to external practical action (A.V. Zaporozhets). Moreover, this practical action is not limited to the movement of the eyes or fingers over the perceived object. A person performs various indicative research actions, which serve as a form of practical verification of a visual (or other) image that arises on the basis of the direct impact of an object on the corresponding sensory organ.
II. Development of perception in different periods of childhood.
1. Infancy to early childhood.
The fact that a child of the first year of life can perceive objects is evidenced by the facts of early recognition of familiar people, toys, and things. Special studies by M.I. Lisina showed that after two and a half months the child carries out initial cognitive activity. At first it does not have a relatively constant structure and is expressed in the child’s peculiar concentration on an object and is associated with erratic movements. After 3 months, the movements become different: the child “examines” a new toy. Several analyzers are involved in the child’s actions simultaneously. The most intense and rapid reactions are carried out by the eye, followed by hand movements. The palpating movements of the mouth play the least role. The eye performs the main function of cognition of an object, the hand is used to grasp and hold it, the actions of the mouth serve as an additional means of actively touching the toy.
As the baby ages, the duration of cognitive reactions noticeably increases. At the same time, the number of chaotic impulsive reactions decreases, the number of active and purposeful movements increases.
After 6 months, the child can identify objects of perception: mother, nanny, rattles. So, a child of 7-9 months reaches for a colorful top and grabs a bright toy. He turns his head to his mother and asks: “Where is mom?”
However, there is no reason to say that up to 7-8 months the child perceives precisely the object, and not the complex stimulus familiar to him. An 8-9 month old baby will not recognize his mother if she approaches him in an unusual way, for example, in a wide-brimmed hat. He does not pick up his favorite bear if he is dressed in a bright suit and a new hat. The perception of a small child is situational, united and global. However, these qualities of perception appear very differently, depending on the perceptual task that the child solves (L.A. Wenger).
For cognition of an object - isolating it as a figure - the following conditions are important:
1. development of the usual differentiation reflex to different objects (for example, the perception of a toy cat is reinforced by the feeling of its soft fur, the perception of a celluloid bunny does not receive such reinforcement);
2. movement of an object against the background of other stationary things;
3. moving the child’s hand over an object, feeling it, performing various manipulative actions with it;
4. naming the object.
Among these conditions, practical actions with things are of particular importance for infants. Research (A.V. Zaporozhets, P.Ya. Galperin, T.V. Endovitskaya) convinces that actions play a decisive role in a child’s sensory knowledge of an object. This fact allows us to quite confidently resolve the long-standing debate among psychologists about which attribute of a perceived object - color or shape - is the main one for a small child.
Since children from one year to 3 years old are especially attracted to bright, colorful objects, a theory arose and was firmly held in psychology about the decisive role of color in a child’s perception of an object (G. Volkelt, D. Katz, A. Decedre). To prove this position, numerous non-uniform experiments were carried out. Children aged 2-5 years were offered different options for games such as lotto. A conflict situation was created. The child received, for example, a large card with geometric shapes of different colors and had to find among them similar to the one depicted on the small card. But the child could not solve such a problem completely correctly, since there were no figures identical in shape and color. If the large card has the same triangle that was pasted on the small one, it was different in color from the sample. The figures that matched in color were different in shape.
By organizing such experiments, researchers were looking for an answer to the question: what would a child prefer – color or shape? It was found that young children highlight and focus primarily on the color of an object. They match the red square with red circles, triangles, etc.
The researchers interpreted this preference for color over shape as a result of the affectivity inherent in a small child. They argued that the child is supposedly a being that does not know, but experiences.
However, the picture of the experiment changed significantly when children of the same age were presented with images of familiar things: a watering can, a bucket, a ball. Under these conditions, 80% of children, even two to two and a half years old, preferred the form. They matched the yellow basket with a blue basket and the green bucket with a red one.
Research has also shown that the ability of children (under 3 years old) to identify objects by their shape directly depends on the time and method of introducing the word denoting a given object. The choice of an object by word is formed gradually. The child goes through a long journey of “linking a word with an object.” At different stages of this path, different roles are played by such components of the whole thing as its color, texture, size and position in space. The greater the general meaning of the word by which an object is named for a child, the less and less role the secondary features of homogeneous objects play.
Thus, the research of Soviet psychologists confirms the thought of I.M. Sechenov that the shape, or more precisely, the outline of an object, is the most significant sign for its perception by a child.
However, observations and special studies (B. Khachapuridze, G.L. Rosengart-Pupko, N.H. Shvachkin, T.I. Danyushevskaya, N.G. Salmina) showed that there are very complex and sometimes even contradictory relationships between color and form when a child perceives an object. These relationships are unstable, changeable and depend on many specific conditions: on whether the object is familiar to the child or new, named by a word or not, on the previous readiness of children to distinguish, compare and generalize objects according to various characteristics, and on many other factors.
The development of perception is reflected in the fact that the shape of an object becomes more and more significant for the child under all conditions.
So, the peculiarities of perception of children under 3 years old include the following:
1. Children of the third year of life can perceive colorless and even contour familiar objects. If the drawings are clear enough, children perceive correctly simple objects and their images: choosing the right pair in lotto (“Give me the same”). Children perceive unfamiliar objects erroneously, sometimes relying on one feature that seems familiar to them or on a secondary feature, including color, size, texture.
2. After 1 year 2 months. – 1 year 8 months children correctly find an object by the word (“Give me a bear”) if they have already formed a strong connection between the word and this object. The older the child, the faster the word acquires a general meaning. This is facilitated by the attribution of a word not to one object, but to several homogeneous ones with changing non-essential features (elephants of different sizes, colors, textures, in different positions). In these cases, children easily recognize a toy (or image of an object) that is new to them based on generalization and distraction (they match a large white elephant not with a white pig of the same size, but with a small brown sitting elephant).
3. From the end of the second year of life, children can usually correctly name a perceived familiar object in response to the question “What is this?” However, usually highlighting only some signs and not seeing individual details, the child often makes mistakes, calling, for example, a shepherd dog a wolf, a tiger cub a cat, and generalizing different objects based on random characteristics (for example, a muff, hair, a cat, he denotes one and the same same word).
4. In the third year of life, a child, perceiving a picture with a simple plot, names each depicted object separately: “Girl, pussy” or “Boy, horse, tree.” Only towards the end of preschool age, as a result of exercises, children begin to see the connections that exist between the depicted objects. Usually these connections are functional - a person and the action he performs: “A girl feeds her pussy,” “A boy rides a horse.”
5. The child becomes familiar with space when he masters walking. However, the spatial characteristics of the objects perceived by the child for a long time remain merged with the content of the object itself.
By acting with objects, the child learns to look, feel, and listen. Therefore, the older he becomes, the greater his experience, the less work he spends on perception, recognition and discrimination of objects, the easier connections between an object and a word are formed.
Constant exercise, which influenced the process of development of sensations in children, is also manifested in the development of their perception. If for the correct choice of the first object according to the named word (red moving beetle) for children from 1 year 9 months. up to 2 years, 6-8 repetitions are needed, then to correctly assign a word to a second object, even more complex, and select it among similar ones, only 4-5 presentations are needed. At the same time, the stability of connections formed per word and the correctness of differentiation in children after 2 years of age quickly increase (N.G. Salmina, K.L. Yakubovskaya).
The result of the exercises is also reflected in the fact that by the beginning of the preschool period the child perceives objects that are unfamiliar to him, independently finding the appropriate name for them based on their similarity to a familiar object (for example, an oval - “egg”, “potato”).
2. Preschool age.
Observing the development of perception in preschool children, scientists reveal even more clearly than in young children the complexity of this form of sensory knowledge of reality.
2.1. Perception of color and shape.
Disputes about which feature of an object is fundamental for its perception continue among psychologists and when discussing the characteristics of sensory cognition of objects by preschool children.
In contrast to the statements of G. Volkelt and other scientists that a child under 7 years of age is “surprisingly blind to shape,” Soviet researchers not only showed the leading role of the shape of an object even in the perception of a preschooler, but also revealed some conditions that make it possible to understand the complexity of the relationship between shapes and the color of the item. Thus, when studying the perception of preschool children, it was possible to establish that the color of an object is an identifying feature for a child only when another, usually strong feature (shape), for some reason did not receive a signal meaning (for example, when making a rug for a colored mosaic).
These facts are most clearly expressed when the child perceives unfamiliar objects. The task facing children also plays a huge role. If it is necessary to lay out a pattern from monochromatic shapes, children are guided by the shape; If you need to “hide” a colored figure on a similar background, color becomes decisive. Sometimes children focus on both signs at the same time (Z.M. Boguslavskaya).
Having eliminated “conflict” in the task proposed to preschool children (either shape or color), S.N. Shabalin showed that even children of primary preschool age are completely correctly guided by the shape of an object, given in the form of a silhouette or even a contour.
In a child’s preference for one or another attribute of an object, the word plays a significant role. Fixing an object, the word identifies shape as its main identifying feature. However, in younger preschoolers the form is merged with the subject content, which is confirmed by the slight objectification of any new form unfamiliar to the child. So three- and four-year-old children see a roof in a triangle, a funnel in a cone with its top turned down, and a window in a rectangle. Five- and six-year-old children can already identify a form based on its similarity to a certain object. They say that a circle is like a wheel, a cube is like a bar of soap, and a cylinder is like a glass.
Having learned the names geometric shapes, children freely operate with appropriate forms, finding them in things familiar to them, i.e. distract form from substantive content. They say that the door is a rectangle, the lampshade is a ball, and the funnel is a cone with a narrow tall cylinder on it. This is how the form becomes “visible”: it acquires a signal meaning for the child and is generally reflected by him on the basis of its abstraction and designation by a word.
2.2. Perception of whole and part.
A controversial issue in child psychology is the question of what the child relies on in his perception of an object: its holistic reflection or recognition of individual parts. Research (F.S. Rosenfeld, L.A. Schwartz, N. Grossman) shows that here there is no unambiguous and only correct answer. On the one hand, in the perception of a whole unfamiliar object, a child, according to G. Volkelt, conveys only his general “impression of the whole”: “something full of holes” (lattice) or “something piercing” (cone). Being “at the mercy of the whole” (Seifert), children supposedly do not know how to identify its constituent parts. Many authors who have studied children’s drawings also point to this “power of the whole.” They explain such facts by the alleged inability of a preschool child for cognitive analytical activity due to his too pronounced emotionality.
However, the facts obtained by other researchers (V. Stern, S.N. Shabalin, O.I. Galkina, F.S. Rosenfeld, G.L. Rosengart-Pupko) convince us that even preschool-age children not only know how to identify any characteristic feature, but also rely on it when identifying a whole object. For example, all objects, and even shapeless lumps of clay that had an elongated “spout,” were called “gucksuckers” by children two to two and a half years old. The dotted image of the beak in the drawing started made it possible for three-year-old children to recognize the bird. Having felt the man's watch in a cloth bag, children (4 years 6 months - 5 years 6 months) usually correctly named this object. As an identifying feature (“How did you know?”) they usually pointed to the “column with a wheel” (the winding of an old-style watch), i.e. relied on one part of the object. However, when choosing “the same” among the objects laid out on the table, the overwhelming majority of preschoolers (3-5 years old) pointed not to a flat round compass, corresponding in size and shape to the model, but to a cubic metal alarm clock. This is also a watch, although it not only has a different shape, but also does not have exactly the detail by which the child recognized the watch.
Similar facts often appear when children perceive objects and their images in the picture, as well as entire episodes and events. Looking at the image of an old man who is dragging a cart with a huge bundle and various things: a bucket, a mop, boots - which are clearly visible, 80% of four- to five-year-old children declare that “the man is pulling a horse.” So, contrary to all logic, the child perceives the knot as a horse only because one corner of it vaguely reminds the child of a horse's head.
Understanding a subject based on one unimportant part of it is called syncretism (E. Claparède). This is the perception of the whole, not based on its analysis.
Syncretic perception of objects is by no means a feature characteristic of young children in general, as E. Claparède, K. Buhler, and J. Piaget claim. It also appears in older children when they perceive unfamiliar objects or their images (car models, diagrams, drawings). Such errors are especially often repeated when a small child perceives poorly, unclearly depicted objects. Then any part of the object that reminds the child of something becomes a support for him. It is no coincidence that the phenomena of syncretism most often occur when using various stylized images in work with children, when the artist, violating the clarity of the real form of the object, resorts to exaggeration, to some image conventions that make it difficult to recognize even objects known to children.
In the productivity of a child’s perception of an object, the action that the child uses during perception is of great importance.
Thus, in the process of perception, the child acquires his personal experience, while simultaneously assimilating social experience. The development of perception is thus characterized not only by a change in its accuracy, volume, and meaningfulness, but also by a restructuring of the very method of perception. This process of sensory cognition is becoming more and more perfect.
2.3. Picture perception.
It is difficult for preschool children to correctly perceive a picture. After all, even the simplest picture, which includes an image of at least two objects, gives them in some spatial connections. Understanding these connections is necessary to reveal the relationships between the parts of the picture. It has long been used to determine the general mental development of a child. Thus, A. Binet introduced this task into the measuring “cliff of the mind” he compiled. At the same time, he and then V. Stern established that there are three levels (stages) of a child’s perception of a picture. The first is the enumeration stage (or, according to Stern, subject), characteristic of children from 2 to 5 years old; the second is the stage of description (or action), which lasts from 6 to 9-10 years; the third is the stage of interpretation (or relationships), characteristic of children after 9-10 years.
The stages outlined by A. Binet and V. Stern made it possible to reveal the evolution of the process of a child’s perception of a complex object—a picture—and to see that children, in the process of mental development, move from fragmentary perception, i.e. recognition of individual objects that are in no way connected with each other, to identifying first their functional connections (which is what a person does), and then to revealing deeper relationships between objects and phenomena: causes, connections, circumstances, goals.
At the highest level, children interpret the picture, bringing their experience, their judgments to what is depicted. They reveal internal connections between objects by understanding the entire situation depicted in the picture. However, the transition to this higher level of understanding cannot in any way be explained by age-related maturation, as A. Binet and V. Stern argued. Research (G.T. Ovsepyan, S.L. Rubinshtein, A.F. Yakovlicheva, A.A. Lyublinskaya, T.A. Kondratovich) showed that the features of a child’s description of a picture depend, first of all, on its content, familiarity or little familiar to the child, depending on the structure of the picture, the dynamism or static nature of the plot.
The question itself with which an adult addresses a child is of great importance. When asking children about what they see in the picture, the teacher directs the child to list any items (important and unimportant) and in any order. Question: “What are they doing here in the picture?” – encourages the child to reveal functional connections, i.e. actions. When children are asked to talk about the events depicted in a picture, the child tries to understand what is depicted. He rises to the level of interpretation. Thus, during the experiment, the same child can show all three stages of picture perception on the same day.
2.4. Perception of time.
Time is the same objectively existing reality as space, since all phenomena of reality exist not only in space, but also in time. The object of knowledge itself, time, is an extremely multifaceted aspect of the surrounding reality. The perception of time is a reflection in the brain of objective duration, speed, and sequence of phenomena of reality (D.B. Elkonin).
According to D.B. Elkonin, to understand different aspects of time, the function of different cortical structures of the brain is needed.
For a child, reflecting time is a much more difficult task than perceiving space. This is due, first of all, to the very nature of time as an object of knowledge and its role in the lives of children.
1. Time is fluid. Not even the smallest unit of time can be perceived immediately, “at once,” but only sequentially: the beginning, and then the end (seconds, minutes, hours).
2. A person does not have a special analyzer to perceive time. Time is known indirectly, through movements and the rhythm of life processes (pulse, breathing rate) or with the help of a special device - a watch. In a mature person, the perception of time is the result of the activity of a number of analyzers, united into a single unique system, acting as a single whole. The child does not yet have this coherence in the work of the analyzers.
3. The perception of time is easily distorted by subjective factors: the fullness of the time period, its significance for the subject, the state of the person himself (expectation, enthusiasm).
4. The designation of time relations is changeable. What was “tomorrow” becomes “today” after the night, and a day later – “yesterday”. This fluidity, abstraction, i.e. The invisibility of time, its fusion with the same life events that the child observes, makes it extremely difficult to isolate and understand.
For the first time, the baby becomes oriented towards time in the middle of the first month of life, when he learns to wake up regularly after 3 hours, at the time of feeding. This conditioned reflex is temporarily one of the earliest in a child’s life.
Children of preschool and primary school age orient themselves in time based on purely everyday indicators. If the life of children is strictly subject to a certain regime, i.e. distributed over time, then a three- or four-year-old child confidently notes the morning (“We haven’t had breakfast yet”) or the evening (“They’ll come for us soon”). He distinguishes between day and night. Soon, these everyday milestones are joined by more objective natural phenomena, which children learn to perceive as signals of a certain time: “Morning (in winter) is not quite light yet,” “Evening is already dark, there is no sun.”
For a long time, children do not understand the objective movement of time, its independence from the will and actions of people, therefore, while correctly using some designations of time, the child essentially does not understand the reality behind them. “Mom, when is my birthday?” - "After two days". - “How many times should I go to bed?” - "Three times". The boy (4 years 4 months) lay down in bed, snored three times and announced that it was his birthday.
If it is difficult for a preschool child to isolate time as an object of cognition, acting invisibly but constantly in the child’s life, then it is many times more difficult for him to identify time in long-past events, imagine its duration, its meaning and place long-past events in sequential order. Therefore, even older preschoolers believe that since their grandmother has been living for a long time, she, of course, saw Suvorov, Pushkin and even Peter I. If a child is told that man descended from a monkey, he does not understand at all what those millions of years that separate animal ancestor from modern humans.
Preschoolers have only knowledge of the present and some vague idea of the past: “It was a long time ago.” In older preschool age, in this amorphous “long ago”, the first temporary landmarks appear: “This was before the war,” “This was before the revolution.” However, these supports are not yet localized in any way in the actual time of the historical past.
The first differentiation of time is the introduction of the words “first”, “then”, “before”, “after that” into a story or description of an event and the teacher showing the meaning of time relations that are significant in a given event. Getting acquainted with the clock and its work, the child begins to understand the independence of time from the desires and activities of a person. In different types of practice, children develop more realistic ideas about time and its units (hour, day, day).
2.5. Perception of space.
Significant changes in the preschool period are observed in the perception of space according to its main features. The child learns about space as he masters it. While still lying in bed and using a pacifier and rattle, the child learns the “close” space. He masters “distant” space a little later, when he learns to move independently. At first, the perception of distant space is little differentiated and the distance estimate is very inaccurate. Interesting in this regard is the recollection of the physiologist Helmholtz, dating back to the age of 3-4: “I myself still remember how as a child I walked past the church tower and saw people in the gallery that seemed like dolls to me, and how I asked my mother to get them for me, that she could have done as I then thought, stretching one hand up.”
The development of orientation in space, as shown by the studies of A.Ya. Kolodnoy, begins with differentiation of spatial relations own body child (identifies and names the right hand, left, paired parts of the body). The inclusion of words in the process of perception, mastery of independent speech greatly contributes to the improvement of spatial relationships and directions (A.A. Lyublinskaya, A.Ya. Kolodnaya, E.F. Rybalko, etc.) “The more accurately words determine the direction,” emphasizes A. .A. Lyublinskaya, “the easier the child navigates it, the more fully he includes these spatial features in the picture of the world he reflects, the more meaningful, logical and integral it becomes for the child.”
The child’s eye, which is so necessary for the perception of space, also develops. Preschoolers solve complex visual problems much worse than problems comparing the lengths of lines. Only six- and seven-year-old children are able to solve them, and then only in cases of large differences between objects. The reason for this is the low level of mastery of visual actions. However, the level of these actions in preschoolers can be raised in the process of targeted learning.
Particularly noticeable changes in the development of the linear eye occur if children are taught to use the superposition of one object on another (putting them close to each other) to solve problems, achieving maximum equalization. The “technical” side of indicative actions does not change depending on whether these actions are performed with the objects themselves or with their substitutes. Thus, when teaching children to solve this type of visual problems, such as choosing an element of a certain length based on a model, the production and use of a cardboard measure equal to the model was introduced. The measure was transferred from the sample to the objects from which a choice was made (the sample itself and the objects were prohibited from being moved).
When children master the ability to measure the width, length, height, shape, volume of objects in such an effective way, they move on to solving problems “by eye” (under the guidance of an adult, gradual internalization occurs - the transition of external indicative action to the perceptual plane). But success will be achieved if mastery of visual actions occurs not through formal exercises, but through the inclusion of these actions in other, broader types of activities. The eye is improved in constructive activities when the child selects the necessary parts that are missing for construction, when he divides a lump of clay so that there is enough of it to sculpt all parts of the object.
The preschooler's eye is also exercised in appliqué, drawing, everyday activities and, of course, in games.
2.6. Perception of works of art.
Soviet psychologists consider artistic perception as a result of personality development. It is not given to a person from birth. The child does not immediately perceive a work of art as such; At the first stages of development, a child is characterized by an effective, utilitarian attitude towards him (children feel, touch the image in the picture, stroke it, etc.). However, the rudiments of artistic perception already appear in preschool age. Soviet psychologists and teachers played a decisive role in the development of this human ability (P.P. Blonsky, A.V. Zaporozhets, N.A. Vetlugina, S.L. Rubinshtein, E.A. Flerina, P.M. Yakobson, etc. ) are devoted to education and training.
Foreign psychologists view this issue differently. According to some of them, the perception of beauty is innate, biologically inherent in humans; psychoanalysts associate artistic perception with sexual instincts. A significant group of psychologists and art historians, giving an intellectual character to the understanding of aesthetic development, believes that in preschool age a child is not yet capable of aesthetic perception; he acquires this ability only at 10-11 years of age.
Children's perception of a picture cannot be considered in isolation from its semantic content. L.S. Vygotsky established experimentally that the stages of perception identified by V. Stern characterize not the development of the perception of pictures, but the relationship between perception and speech at certain stages of development. Of great importance in artistic perception, in understanding the meaning of what is depicted, is the composition of the work, the degree of coincidence of the semantic and structural centers of the picture.
The perception of a work of art is a complex mental process. It presupposes the ability to recognize and understand what is depicted; but this is only a cognitive act. A necessary condition for artistic perception is the emotional coloring of what is perceived, the expression of the attitude towards it (B.M. Teplov, P.M. Yakobson, A.V. Zaporozhets, etc.). A.V. Zaporozhets noted: “... aesthetic perception is not reduced to a passive statement of certain aspects of reality, even very important and significant ones. It requires that the perceiver somehow enter into the depicted circumstances and mentally take part in the actions.”
The value judgments of preschool children are still primitive, but they indicate the emergence of the ability not only to feel the beautiful, but also to appreciate it.
When perceiving works of art, not only the general attitude towards the entire work matters, but also the nature of the attitude, the child’s assessment of individual characters.
The degree of proximity and accessibility of the image also matters in artistic perception. For example, younger children, in the roles of resourceful, humorous characters, most often prefer to see animals with anthropomorphic characteristics that have shown themselves positively in fairy tales familiar to them; middle preschoolers - animals, fairy-tale people, children of the same age; the elders are often simply the most entertaining and resourceful, the most cheerful character.
Children of older preschool age, much more often than younger ones, are able to perceive not only external, but also internal comedy, humor, and irony in a work of art.
In the process of developing artistic perception, children develop an understanding of the expressive means of a work of art, which leads to a more adequate, complete, and deep perception of it.
The skillful use of music and artistic expression has a positive effect on preschoolers’ understanding of paintings, helping to better perceive the artistic images embodied in them. Interesting techniques that develop emotional responsiveness, observation, and awaken artistic taste.
It is important to form in children a correct assessment of the characters in a work of art. Conversations can provide effective assistance in this regard, especially using problematic questions. They lead the child to understand the “second”, true face of the characters, previously hidden from them, the motives of their behavior, and to independently re-evaluate them (in the case of an initial inadequate assessment).
A preschooler's perception of works of art will be deeper if he learns to see the elementary means of expressiveness used by the author to characterize the depicted reality (color, color combinations, shape, composition, etc.).
The development of aesthetic perception occurs in all types of artistic and everyday activities of the child. With competent guidance from adults, it can reach a relatively high level already in preschool age.
2.7. Human perception.
The complex mental process that is the perception of a person by a person is formed along with the development of the perceiver himself, with a change in his need for communication, cognition and work. Already at the end of the first – beginning of the second month of life, the child begins to distinguish the adult from environment, first with a smile, then with a complex of revival to react to it. This social-perceptual process actively develops already in infancy and early childhood.
A child’s perception of a person is a necessary act of manifestation and satisfaction of the most important social needs– communication needs. At the same time, it is in the process of communicating with adults that the child’s perception of him develops especially intensively. The development of communication with adults and changes in its content enable the child not only to more subtly differentiate the external appearance of the people around him, but also to perceive them from different sides, to isolate their essential functions. Thus, already in the process of business communication (from 10-11 months), an adult acts for the child not only as a person capable of satisfying his organic needs, but also as an organizer of acquaintance with the social experience of actions with objects, as a leader in his orientation in the world around him. It is extremely important that at this early stage, a period sensitive for the development of speech, the adult also acts for the child as a carrier of speech forms of communication. Mastering speech has a significant impact on the process of developing a child’s perception of a person. It is thanks to this that a person begins to appear in the child’s perception as a person possessing not only direct sensory properties, but also mental properties signaled by them.
In the preschool period, the perception of a person continues to actively form, which is greatly facilitated by the child’s mastery of new types of activities (especially collective ones), the expansion of the circle and the emergence of non-situational personal communication.
An active form of reflection by a preschooler of a person is a game in which he recreates the images of relatives and the relationships between them. The peculiarities of a child’s reflection of a person are also revealed by children’s visual creativity. By the kind of people a child portrays, how their images are revealed, one can to a certain extent judge his attitude towards them, what he easily imprints in a person, what he pays more attention to.
Children give the most positive assessment to those surrounding adults to whom they feel trust and affection. In human perception, as rightly noted by A.A. Bodalev, “reflects the position that a person generally occupies in the system of values to which the cognizing subject is guided in his everyday behavior.” It has been noticed that children with a high sociometric status in the group more often than those who are “unpopular” positively evaluate the teacher based on the teacher’s personal attitude towards the child.
The child's position in the peer group is also reflected in the children's perceptions of each other. Special studies have revealed that the higher a child’s position in the group, the higher his peers rate him, and vice versa. According to R.A. Maksimova, with a greater degree of objectivity (79-90%), children evaluate peers occupying leading and middle positions in interpersonal relationships. Children with a low sociometric status are assessed less adequately (the degree of objectivity here is only 40-50%).
Affects preschoolers’ perception of each other and the nature of their relationships. When assessing the guys they show sympathy for, children overwhelmingly name only their positive qualities. Among the main positive qualities Peer preschoolers note the ability to play well, kindness, camaraderie, lack of aggressiveness, hard work, ability, accuracy.
The ability to see and evaluate the personal qualities of others helps the child to perceive the heroes of works of art.
Investigating the perception by preschool children of the expressive side of drawing, T.A. Repina found that the most accessible emotions for a preschooler are those reflected directly in the facial expressions of the depicted character. It is much more difficult (especially for younger preschoolers) to perceive emotional content conveyed in posture and gestures, and especially when it is embodied through the depiction of relationships. The following levels of perception were established:
1. neither the emotion expressed in the picture nor its plot is understood;
2. the emotion is correctly perceived, although the plot is not clearly understood;
3. the plot of the picture is realized and its emotional content is adequately perceived.
It is also important what emotional state children perceive: the emotions of joy and anger expressed in the facial expressions of the characters in the picture are more easily captured by preschoolers than the expressions of sadness and sadness.
Adults play an important role in the development of a child's social perception. In the process of directing the activities of children, their communication, and their perception of works of art, an adult (parent, teacher) pays attention to different aspects of the preschooler’s behavior, his appearance, the manifestation of personal, intellectual strong-willed qualities. By assessing and recording them, an adult not only helps children better understand the people around them, but also forms in them “points of view on people”, “standards” with which they should “check” their behavior and with which they should “measure” the behavior of their comrades . The behavior and appearance of the adult himself and the established relationships in his personal microenvironment are very significant in this process.
III. Junior school age.
At primary school age, the development of perception continues. By improving observation, perception becomes an increasingly focused and controlled process. Thanks to the accumulated experience, seven- and ten-year-old children easily recognize objects and entire pictures. Schoolchildren confidently perceive even unfamiliar mechanisms, plants, and signs “categorically,” i.e. as representatives of some group of things: “This is some kind of machine,” “Some kind of bush.” Syncreticism in younger schoolchildren is expressed less and less due to the increasing attention to the relationships of parts as a whole, the desire to find semantic connections when perceiving an object.
However, even in younger schoolchildren it is easy to see some uniqueness of perception. It is caused to a large extent by errors in the knowledge of space, although the accuracy of distinguishing geometric shapes and their correct naming in children after 7 years of age noticeably increases compared to preschool children (L.A. Shvarts, S.V. Mukhin, M.N. Volokitina ). But only 55% of children who entered school correctly designate geometric shapes (B.I. Khachapuridze). First-graders also retain a tendency to objectify forms unfamiliar to them (O.I. Galkina, S.N. Shabalin). Therefore, younger students call a cylinder a glass, a cone (overturned) a top or a roof, a tetrahedral prism a column, etc. This speaks of the difficulties that have not yet been overcome in abstracting form from the object.
Errors in recognizing geometric bodies indicate a low level of children's orientation in shapes. Indeed, before school, children usually master only two shapes: a ball and a cube. Moreover, the cube is familiar to them more as an element of building material (a cube), and not as a geometric body. They know planar figures better, among them a square, a circle, a triangle.
But in the knowledge of even these few first-graders, errors are revealed that are associated with incorrect teaching of children before school. For example, children easily confuse three-dimensional bodies with flat shapes. Seeing a drawn circle, children call it “ball”, “ball”. Children perceive a drawn ball (with its characteristic convexity, marked by shading and highlights) as a circle. Even more errors are observed in recognizing a cylinder and a cone (O.I. Galkina). There is only one reason - the lack special education children see an object in the third dimension, which is learned primarily through touch, in the process of modeling, and constructive activity. Therefore, labor work should be widely used as educators kindergarten, and by teachers to familiarize children with three-dimensional forms and consolidate clear ideas about them among schoolchildren.
The reason for the persistence of many errors in the perception and discrimination of figures by primary schoolchildren is their continued situational perception. Thus, many of them recognize a straight line if it is drawn in a horizontal position, but if they are drawn vertically or obliquely, children do not perceive it as a straight line. The same thing happens when perceiving a triangle. If children associated this word only with a right triangle and only in one of its positions in space (for example, the hypotenuse is on the right, the vertex is at the top), then all other types of the same figure and even the same right triangle, placed with the top down, the students no longer belong to this group of geometric figures. Such limitations indicate that younger schoolchildren still have vagueness and lack of differentiation in their perception.
Such errors have a common cause: the unity of the perceived sign. The child grasps only the general appearance of the sign, but does not see its elements, structure, or spatial relationships of these elements. Such unity is overcome not by the number of repeated entries of each sign, but by its division into elements and the active construction of the sign. Children need to be shown where the circle, dot, long stick comes from, where the short horizontal line of the number 5 is pointing, where the lines in a given letter connect.
A huge role in the development of spatial perception is played by the comparison of two similar, but in some ways different objects. Such a comparison allows us to highlight those distinctive features of objects that are characteristic of them (L.I. Rumyantseva).
The teacher's requirements to fit the entire alphabetic (or digital) sign and each of its individual elements in a certain place in the notebook, and to write it down exactly on a ruler, increase the difficulty of writing numbers and letters. At the same time, such requirements teach children to isolate certain spatial features.
In the development of “spatial vision”, mastering measurement plays a significant role. Familiarity with the meter and centimeter “materializes” the spatial characteristics of objects, and measuring activities in the lessons of mathematics, labor, natural history, and physical education develop the eye, the assessment of distance and magnitude; the child learns to identify the spatial characteristics of objects and their combinations.
The increasingly easy identification of spatial features and connections, the improvement of observation and understanding clearly affect further development perception of a plot (including artistic) picture by junior schoolchildren.
As a result of special training, children begin to perceive not only the plot of the picture, but also the features of the composition, as well as many expressive details. The disciples feel the sultry hot day during the harvest or the damp, foggy air on the lake.
This perception is accomplished as a single difficult process the constant movement of thought from the perception of the whole picture (synthesis) to its analysis, then again to the whole picture and again to the isolation of ever smaller and previously unnoticed details that allow a deeper understanding of the idea of the picture. Choosing a name for this highest form generalizations, is quite accessible to children aged 7-11 years old and is an effective means of teaching schoolchildren to identify the main thing in a picture.
At primary school age, a special type of perception—listening—develops significantly. Already in preschool childhood, the child was guided by the instructions, demands, and assessments of an adult based on the perception of his speech. He listened with pleasure to the teacher's story and fairy tale. For schoolchildren, listening becomes not only a means, but also a type of educational activity. Listening is included in any lesson, since all the student’s actions, his success, and therefore his grade primarily depend on his ability to listen to the teacher’s explanations and instructions. In addition, children listen with a critical focus to the answers, decisions, and explanations of their comrades. Listening, like reading, becomes a unique form of mental activity for children. Such mental activity requires not only isolating individual words and understanding the meaning of each of them. Listening to a story requires making connections between words in a sentence and connections between sentences, paragraphs, and finally sections and chapters. Just as in the perception of a picture, a summary of the entire content is given in the title of the story and the subtitles given to each part, which ensures a deeper understanding by children of the entire text.
In the development of a primary school student, the perception of time is becoming increasingly important. Students are forced to keep track of time so as not to be late for school in order to complete their assignments before the bell rings. assigned work to start preparing your home lessons on time. Children get used to a certain lesson duration. Time appears for them more and more often and more diversely as one of the primary conditions for the success of individual tasks and human activity in general. Children learn to navigate time and use a clock. The names of units of time known to them from an early age (hour, minute, day) are filled with content and acquire certainty.
However, even in grades V-VI, children often make mistakes in determining such time units as a minute or a second, and such unfamiliar intervals as 5, 10 and 15 minutes.
By the middle of primary school age, children are able to navigate the time of day, evaluate different periods of time, save time, and wisely distribute necessary tasks, taking into account their duration. Of course, at the same time, schoolchildren make serious mistakes for a long time, usually imagining the duration of any task to be shorter than it actually is. That’s why children in grades III-IV so often do not have time to do everything they planned in advance.
A huge achievement in the development of the perception of a primary school student is his establishment of the first connections of space, time, and quantity.
The formation of ideas about time, its objective nature and the duration of various time periods is greatly facilitated by schoolchildren’s acquisition of basic knowledge of natural history (about the annual and daily movement of the Earth, the time of seed germination, and seasonal phenomena).
Among the conditions that ensure the perception of time by schoolchildren, the study of the verb with its forms of present, past and future tense in Russian lessons also plays a significant role. Analysis of sentences, a special change in the verb and the corresponding restructuring of the entire sentence demonstrates to children the semantic meaning of time, ensures its isolation, differentiation, and reveals to the student the knowledge of the accuracy of its verbal designation: “I bought, I buy, I will buy.”
Thus, learning, the main activity for a primary school student, introduces him to the category of time. The child’s developing independence, participation in clubs and various social activities encourages him to navigate time more often, more accurately, and more consistently. He learns to save time, learns its irreversibility, its greatest value.
3.1. Perception of works of art.
By the end of preschool age, in primary school age, the attitude towards what is perceived changes - the ability to take a position outside of what is depicted, the position of a spectator, appears (N.D. Nikolenko and others).
In the process of developing artistic perception, an assessment of what is perceived also arises.
The special, incomparable educational power of art “lies in this, first of all, that it makes it possible to enter “inside life,” to experience a piece of life reflected in the light of a certain worldview,” said the greatest Soviet psychologist B.M. Teplov. “And the most important thing is that in the process of this experience certain attitudes and moral assessments are created that have incomparably greater coercive power than assessments simply communicated or assimilated.” Initially, the assessments that arise as a result of a person’s internal activity are expressed in a preference for what one simply likes: together with the artistic development of a person, they improve and acquire the character of high judgments about art from the point of view of an aesthetic ideal.
IV. Conclusion.
1. Perception requires not only the readiness of analyzers, but also some experience: knowledge about things and the ability to perceive them. Therefore, perception is formed throughout the entire period of child development. Improving perception is inseparable from the general mental development of the child.
2. In a child’s perception of an object, the decisive role belongs to the form (contour), outside of which the object cannot exist. The child perceives an object most early under the following conditions:
With its mobility against the background of motionless things;
during the child’s actions with an object (manipulative, object-based actions, feeling the object, then modeling, modeling, designing, depicting);
when developing a special conditioned differentiation reflex to shape, size, location in space;
when denoting an object (teapot, ball) or geometric shape with words;
Color becomes an accentuated component of a perceived object when it:
Became a signal as a result of a developed reflex;
is characteristic feature subject;
denoted by a word when perceiving an unfamiliar object;
competes with an abstract form (geometric) that is unfamiliar to children.
3. The perception of any object and its image is a reflection of the whole in the relationship of its constituent parts. These relationships between the whole and the part are changeable and mobile. Any process of perceiving an object as a whole requires isolating its features, sides, parts (analysis) and establishing connections between them (synthesis). Thus, mental activity appears most clearly in the perception of complex content: a picture, a text, the perception of which requires understanding, i.e. is a form of complex mental activity.
4. The process of developing the perception of a plot picture goes through three levels: enumeration, description and interpretation. These levels indicate different degrees of understanding by the child of the content given to him and depend on:
From the structure of the picture;
on the degree of closeness of its plot to the child’s experience;
on the form of the question posed;
from the child’s general culture, observation skills;
from the development of his speech.
Therefore, the child can show at the same time different levels perception of pictures. In other words, levels can coexist.
5. In the development of the perception of objects and events in people’s lives, the characteristics of objects and connections: spatial and temporal, play a huge role. The child first learns them in the conditions of everyday life through sensory contemplation, movements, and various practical actions. The inclusion of knowledge about space and time, their isolation, comprehension and generalization in different types of activities ensures the child’s early identification of these aspects of reality and their comprehension. This improves the cognitive activity of children.
6. Having learned to perceive their surroundings meaningfully, schoolchildren have the opportunity to directly connect theoretical knowledge with their practical (extracurricular, social, youth, sports, etc.) activities. Children master the ability to voluntarily and consistently observe their surroundings, to connect facts noticed in life with information obtained from books and the teacher’s explanations. Theoretical understanding of the new material being studied encourages the student to again test in practice the “discoveries” he has made. Students acquire solid, meaningful knowledge and master observation. The culture of perception is the improvement of all cognitive activities of the child.
7. The development of perception is a transition from a child’s united, syncretic, fragmented perception of objects to a dissected, meaningful and categorical reflection of things, events, phenomena in their spatial, temporal, causal relationships. With the development of perception, its structure and its mechanism also change. In babies, the eye follows the movement of the hand. In older children, the work of the eye is freed from the need to rely on touch and hand movement. The word begins to play an increasingly important role as a means of analysis and generalization of perceived content.
Perception is the reflection in the human mind of objects or phenomena with their direct impact on the senses. In the course of perception, individual sensations are ordered and combined into holistic images of things.
Unlike sensations, which reflect individual properties of the stimulus, perception reflects the object as a whole, in the totality of its properties. Moreover, perception is not reduced to the sum of individual sensations, but represents a qualitatively new stage of sensory cognition with its inherent characteristics. The most important features of perception are objectivity, integrity, structure, constancy and meaningfulness.
Perception depends not only on irritation, but also on the perceiving subject himself. What perceives is not an isolated eye, not an ear in itself, but a specific living person, and perception is always affected by the personality characteristics of the perceiver, his attitude to what is perceived, needs, interests, aspirations, desires and feelings. The dependence of perception on the content of a person’s mental life, on the characteristics of his personality is called apperception.
Numerous data show that the picture perceived by the subject is not simply the sum of instantaneous sensations; it often contains details that are not even present on the retina at the moment, but which a person seems to see on the basis of previous experience.
Perception is an active process that uses information to formulate and test hypotheses. The nature of these hypotheses is determined by the content of the individual’s past experience. As research results have shown, when subjects are presented with unfamiliar figures representing an arbitrary combination of straight and curved lines, already in the first phases of perception a search is carried out for those standards to which the perceived object could be attributed. In the process of perception, hypotheses are put forward and tested about whether an object belongs to a particular category.
Thus, when perceiving any object, traces of past perceptions are also activated. Therefore, it is natural that the same object can be perceived and reproduced differently by different people. The richer a person’s experience, the more knowledge he has, the richer his perception, the more he will see in the subject.
The content of perception is determined by the task assigned to a person and the motives of his activity. For example, when listening to a piece of music performed by an orchestra, we perceive the entire musical fabric as a whole, without highlighting the sound of each instrument. Only by setting the goal to highlight the sound of an instrument can this be done. Then the sound of this instrument will come to the fore, become the object of perception, and everything else will form the background of perception.
Emotions are also involved in the process of perception, which can change the content of perception. The important role of emotional reactions in perception is confirmed by a number of different experiments. Everything that has been said about the influence on the perception of the past experience of the subject, the motives and goals of his activities, attitudes, emotional state (this can also include beliefs, a person’s worldview, his interests, etc.) show that perception is an active process that can be controlled .
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Development of perception. Conditions adequate perception of the surrounding world.
Perception changes under the influence of human living conditions, i.e. develops. For a long time it was believed that the newborn has a very poor sensory “baggage”, insufficient to decipher various elements of the environment. But as our knowledge of the fetus and the newborn grows, we are forced to recognize that from birth a child has a relatively programmed brain and already quite effective senses.
In the first months of a child’s life, the development of his sensory functions is ahead of the development of bodily movements and influences them. Quite early, children’s indicative reactions reach a high level of complexity and are performed using a number of different analyzers. In an infant, orienting eye movements, for example, perform only an establishing role, that is, they direct the receptor to perceive signals. The same movements, however, do not examine objects in the same way as occurs when an adult’s eyes move over an object.
It is known that a child's early sensory experience plays a decisive role in the development of perception: without such experience, atrophy of some cells in the sensory systems can lead to irreversible damage, as was noted in people who were blind from birth after their vision was restored.
VISION. A baby's visual acuity reaches the same level as that of an adult only at the end of the first year of life. It has been shown that he best perceives objects located 19 cm from his face. Perhaps this plays a big role in recognizing the mother's face during feeding. This hypothesis is very plausible, since another researcher found that the infant shows an innate preference for human faces from the fourth day of life (Fantz, 1970).
From the age of four months, the child is able to distinguish between the following colors: blue (blue), green, yellow and red, while he gives preference to blue and red. In addition, young children, as it turns out, rarely go near steep cliffs. Gibson and Walk (1960) proved with the help of the “visual cliff” that the perception of depth is already present from a very early age and the child does not dare to crawl onto glass hanging over emptiness. Apparently, this reaction is not acquired through experience, since it appears in young animals at the age of several hours. In infants up to two months old, who cannot yet crawl, their heart rate increases if they are placed stomach down on glass at a height of more than a meter from the floor.
Depth perception is closely related to the development of binocular vision, and the latter appears only when both eyes are already able to converge on one point. This mechanism is developed in most children in the first months of life. Therefore, if a child older than 6 months still exhibits strabismus (strabismus), it is very important to quickly perform surgical intervention to correct this defect. Otherwise, the chances of developing binocular vision become slim. In addition, the brain will gradually stop perceiving signals coming from the defective eye, and the child will become “functionally one-eyed” for a more or less long time (J. Godefroy).
Thanks to the precise installation of receptors, in the first months of life a child is able to visually distinguish between old and new objects that differ from each other in size, color and shape. Starting from three to four months of life, sensory functions are included in practical actions, restructured on their basis and gradually acquire a more advanced form of indicative and exploratory perceptual actions.
B.G. Ananyev, who devoted a large amount of research to this problem, identified the following perceptual actions:
- measuring, allowing you to estimate the size of the perceived object;
- commensurate, comparing the sizes of several objects;
- construction, responsible for constructing a perceptual image; tests, comparing the emerging image with the characteristics of the object;
- corrective, correcting errors in the image;
- tonic-regulatory, maintaining the necessary level of muscle tone for the perception process, etc.
All these actions are formed during a person’s life in the process of practical operation of objects of perception and observation and develop and improve as life experience accumulates. The initial period for the formation of perceptual actions is the second or third year of life, but the most significant is the later period of preschool childhood, as well as school age. In this regard, a very important point is the special organization of children’s development, training in the most effective perceptual actions in certain conditions of perception.
An indispensable condition for ensuring the success of such training is constant Feedback, i.e., constant receipt of information about how accurate the image that has arisen is and, therefore, how accurate the actions taken were. The process of perceiving a new object is usually extensive: a large number of very different features of the object, more or less informative, are analyzed. As perception develops (or as the corresponding activity is mastered), the number of these signs is reduced, only the most significant of them remain, which subsequently perform a signaling function. The formation of so-called operational units of perception occurs - sensory standards, ideal images stored in memory with which a person compares what he perceives at the moment. Such standards can be the contours of objects, the tone of the color scheme, gradations of volume and pitch, and other features. It is very important that they are adequate to the features of the objects.
The process of development of perception in ontogenesis occurs in two interrelated directions:
Formation of the system of motor (motor) components of perception;
Assimilation, selection of a system of sensory standards.
The general direction of development of perceptual actions themselves in the process of object recognition is the transition from successive perception (sequential looking) to simultaneous (collapsed, one-time).
So, the eyes of a 3-year-old child do not perform very many movements. At 4–5 years of age, these movements are twice as large. At the same time, the gaze already stops at characteristic features items inspected. The 6-year-old has a different type of movement - along the contours of the figures. The ability to look improves until the age of 12. In adulthood, for example, inspection of an object is carried out fluently, using two or three of the most significant points, which become signals of complex images.
During the transition from early to preschool age, under the influence of playful and constructive activities, children develop complex types of visual analysis and synthesis, including the ability to mentally dissect a perceived object into parts in the visual field, examining each of them separately and then combining them into a single whole. In addition to the outline of the object, its structure, spatial characteristics, and the relationship of its constituent parts are highlighted.
In general, there are three main lines of development of the perception of space and spatial thinking:
1) transition from three-dimensional space to two-dimensional;
2) transition from visual images to conventionally schematic ones and back;
3) transition from a frame of reference fixed on itself during perception to a freely chosen or arbitrarily given one.
A.V. Zaporozhets believed that the formation of perceptual actions under the influence of learning goes through a number of stages. At the first stage, perceptual problems associated with the formation of an adequate image are solved by the child in practical terms through actions with material objects. Corrections in perceptual actions, if necessary, are made here in the manipulations with objects themselves as the action progresses. The passage of this stage is accelerated, and its results become more significant if the child is offered “perceptual standards” - samples with which he can relate and compare the emerging image.
At the next stage, sensory processes themselves turn into unique perceptual actions, which are performed using the own movements of the receptive apparatus. At this stage, children become familiar with the spatial properties of objects with the help of extensive orienting and exploratory movements of the hands and eyes, and manual and visual examination of the situation usually precedes practical actions in it, determining their nature and direction.
At the third stage, the process of a kind of curtailment of perceptual actions begins, their reduction to the necessary and sufficient minimum. The efferent links of the corresponding actions are inhibited, and the external perception of the situation begins to create the impression of a passive receptive process.
On the next, more high levels sensory learning, children acquire the ability to quickly and without any external movements recognize certain properties perceived objects, distinguish them from each other on the basis of these properties, detect and use the connections and relationships that exist between them. Perceptual action turns into ideal action.
Psychologists identify a number of rules, the implementation of which contributes to the development of a child’s perception during the learning process:
Considering the connection between perception and motivation, it is necessary to give instructions for the perception of the desired material (object, phenomenon);
Control the dynamics of the object and background of perception;
Use multimodal types of visualization of educational material;
Carry out practical activities with spatial objects;
Practice combination practical measurements by eye using measuring instruments;
Teach children to transfer a fixed point of reference to any other point in space, etc.
Conditions for adequate perception of the surrounding world. In addition to such conditions for adequate perception of the surrounding world as activity and effective feedback, for correct perception it is also necessary to maintain a certain minimum of information entering the brain from the external and internal environment, and maintain its usual structure.
The importance of the first condition is demonstrated in studies of isolating subjects from stimuli coming from the environment and from their own body (sensory and perceptual deprivation). The essence of sensory deprivation is that subjects are isolated from external influences using special techniques. For example, to reduce skin sensitivity, subjects are placed in a warm bath, to reduce visual information, they are given light-proof glasses, and to eliminate auditory sensitivity, they are placed in a soundproof room.
A normal, physically healthy person, immersed in a bath where no acoustic or light stimuli reach him and tactile, olfactory, and temperature sensations are almost excluded, experiences great difficulty in controlling his thoughts and ideas. At the same time, he loses orientation in the structure of his own body, so he begins to have hallucinations and nightmares. When examining subjects in the early stages of such isolation, disturbances in perception were observed, especially visual: color, shape, size and distance. In some conditions, the color seemed brighter and more saturated, while in others, color discrimination was lost. Even partial exclusion of the influx of fresh impressions leads to a significant distortion of perception. Thus, the famous speleologist Siffre did not distinguish between green and blue colors another whole month after a two-month lack of information due to being alone in a cave.
Sensory isolation also provokes changes in the perception of depth and size constancy. Then to a person everything around may seem flat, the surrounding objects seem to be in the same plane, as if drawn, and the walls of the room either “approach” or “move away”. Sometimes flat surfaces are perceived as curved. For example, participants in Antarctic expeditions working in an extremely visually homogeneous environment showed a tendency to overestimate the size of objects and underestimate the distance to them, as well as a change in the perception of movement speed. Sensory deprivation also leads to changes in the perception of time: short - to an overestimation, and long-term - to an underestimation of time intervals. In this case, a change in visual and auditory alertness is observed. The general direction of changes due to isolation (for all types of perception) is an increase in sensitivity.
As already mentioned, with sensory deprivation there is a loss of constancy of perception, a violation of color vision, a distortion of the perception of shape, etc. All this indicates that for normal perception a constant and certain in volume influx of signals from the external environment is necessary. If perception were reduced only to passive reception of information, then one could expect that mental processes would not be disrupted during temporary interruptions in the flow of information. However, experiments with sensory deprivation showed the opposite. In conditions of isolation, human mental activity, based on perception, declines. During the experiment, the subjects, having discovered an inability for ordinary thinking, tried to compensate for the lack of external stimuli with memories or fantasies, but soon the remembered and imagined pictures became intrusive and uncontrollable, independent of the person’s will, as if they were imposed on him from the outside. This process even led to hallucinations. If the subjects had the opportunity to move voluntarily, then these phenomena were mitigated, but not completely eliminated.
It has been noticed that in conditions of natural “sensory starvation” people strive for creative activity: they sculpt, write poetry, stories. Interestingly, in conditions of loneliness, internal speech can again become external, replacing absent interlocutors. Habitual forms of social communication (advice, approval, reprimand, consolation, reminders) are excluded under these conditions, and a person is forced, in the process of adapting to loneliness, to develop special mechanisms for regulating his existence, in particular, talking aloud to himself. It is not surprising that the behavior of most people after the cessation of long-term loneliness showed increased activity with animated facial expressions, and many of them obsessively sought to enter into verbal contact with others.
The data presented concerned a sharp reduction in the flow of information from the external environment. However, a decrease in the volume of signals coming from the internal environment of the body also has an adverse effect on perception. Let's explain this with examples. Observations were made of the perception of people in a state of weightlessness, that is, in conditions when the flow of impulses from skeletal muscles, which makes a significant contribution to the information entering the brain, is sharply reduced. One subject described his experiences this way: “I realized that a state of weightlessness had arrived. I suddenly had a feeling of rapidly falling down; it seemed that everything around me was collapsing, falling apart and flying apart. I was overcome with a feeling of horror, and I did not understand what was happening around me.” It is now known that changes in the perception of the surrounding world, observed with different types of perceptual deprivation, are caused by changes in the functioning of the brain due to mismatch and distortion of information coming to it from the muscles and sensory organs.
Many astronauts, when weightlessness set in, experienced the illusion of inversion, i.e., a change in the perception of the position of their body in space. It seemed to one that he was in a half-bent position face down, and to the other that he was upside down. The illusion was tested both with open and with closed eyes and could last for many hours. Why is this happening? It is known that muscles make up about 40% of body weight. In a state of weightlessness, the load on muscles that constantly work in gravity drops sharply, which leads to a decrease in the flow of nerve impulses from the muscles to certain brain structures. It is important to note that these illusions disappeared as soon as the muscles received a load.
In a state of weightlessness, not only the perception of the position of one’s own body in space changed, but significant errors arose in the visual assessment of distance. In addition, the resolution of vision changed (increased). Thus, astronaut Cooper wrote in his flight log that, while flying over Tibet, he saw houses and other buildings on Earth with the naked eye. However, as calculations have shown, the normal resolution of the human eye does not allow us to distinguish such objects from such a height. Researchers initially regarded this phenomenon only as a hallucination that arose as a result of loneliness and sensory hunger. However, this position had to be reconsidered when similar messages came from many astronauts. For example, V.I. Sevastyanov noticed that in the first days of space flight he distinguished few objects on Earth. Then he began to distinguish ships in the ocean, then ships at the pier, then trains. At the end of the flight, he distinguished personal plots and buildings on them.
To clarify the mechanism of such an increase in sensitivity, special experiments were carried out on Earth. Sound signals were transmitted into a completely soundproofed room (audience chamber) from the next room (equipment room) through a sound duct - muffled, at a subthreshold level. The subject had to report the perceived sounds in the form of a report. It turned out that in those cases when he was aware of the phenomena occurring outside the camera, he quite accurately and adequately perceived noises and conversations in the control room, which was ensured by an increase in auditory sensitivity due to prolonged and complete silence. When he was not aware (if he could not guess what was happening there), then he perceived (interpreted) all sounds erroneously, however, even in this case he remained firmly convinced of the reality and accuracy of his perceptions.
Based on these experiments, it was concluded that isolation increases the resolution of not only vision and hearing. Under conditions of some information deficiency (for example, in weightlessness), additional effects arise: in addition to increasing the sensitivity of perception systems, the degree of accessibility of various hypotheses in memory changes. This occurs due to a violation of the relationship between the flow of information from the center and the periphery - its displacement towards the center.
So, the phenomena that arise during weightlessness have clearly demonstrated the importance of a constant flow of information from the internal and external environment for the correct functioning of perception.
At the same time, an important condition for the normal functioning of images of perception is the organization and structure of the information received. Man lives in a world of things and phenomena, limited in space and time and located in certain relationships with each other. Having found himself in conditions where his field of perception does not have the usual division and organization, a person cannot perceive such an unusual thing for a long time and adequately. the world, and experiences disturbances in a number of mental functions. Such distortions are observed in people located in the sultry desert or arctic silence. It is assumed that sometimes mirages that arise may be a consequence of the psyche’s attempts to compensate for the lack of structure in the external environment with the help of ideas extracted from memory, that is, be the result of efforts to achieve the usual organization of perception.
Another example is an experiment in which a subject wearing a spacesuit was placed in a tank of water. In this position, the subjects fell asleep in the first half hour, and when they woke up, they experienced perceptual disturbances. They could not distinguish between up and down, left and right. It is important for us now to pay attention to the fact that in their minds there was only one thought that they could not get rid of, or one bright picture. If a phrase was presented through the headphones, then this obsessive thought or scene was replaced by a new one, depending on this phrase. And only when coherent text or music was presented through headphones, did the perception and thinking of the subjects become normal. The following example can be given. The subjects were asked to look for a long time at a television screen on which there were only random combinations of spots (white noise). There was nothing in their field of vision except the screen. In this case, perception was disrupted, and this disturbance was similar to that that occurred with sensory isolation.
Perception is an active process. Initially guided only by external influences, human activity gradually begins to be regulated by images.
Perception develops under optimal conditions: when interaction with the environment is qualitatively diverse and quantitatively sufficient, then full-fledged methods of analyzing an object are organized and systems of signs are synthesized to construct adequate images of the external environment. Lack of stimuli and, even more so, hunger for information do not allow perception to fulfill its functions and provide correct and reliable orientation for us in the external environment.
The image is individual, it belongs inner world of a given person, since the selectivity of perception, when forming a specific image, is directed by his personal interests, needs, motives and attitudes, this determines the uniqueness and emotional coloring of the image. The images formed in the process of perception have qualities that make it possible to regulate appropriate behavior. When immersing external movements (interiorization), on the one hand, the structure of external actions with an object changes, motor components are reduced and transformed, and on the other, an internal image of the object with which a person interacts is formed.
The basic properties of the image - constancy, objectivity, integrity, generality - indicate a certain independence of it from changes in the conditions of perception within specific limits: constancy - from changes in the physical conditions of observation, objectivity - from the diversity of the background against which the object is perceived, integrity - from distortion and replacement parts of a figure, generality - from variations in the properties of objects within the boundaries of a given class. We can say that generality is constancy within a class, integrity is structural constancy, and objectivity is semantic constancy.
It should also be emphasized that important point. We can rely on the skills and methods of perception we have developed solely within the framework of the conditions in which they were developed, that is, it is permissible to count on the adequacy, accuracy and reliability of our perception only when we are in our usual habitat. Beyond its limits, natural errors of perception and even illusions will arise, and inadequacy will persist until perception adjusts to new conditions with the help of feedback.
Perception.
Perceptions. , (HERE IS INFORMATION FOR QUESTION 26, 27,)
Perception is called psyche. the process of reflecting objects and phenomena in reality in the totality of their properties and parts with a direct impact on the senses.
There are 4 operations at 4 levels of perceptive action: detection, discrimination, identification and recognition: Detection is the initial phase of the development of any sensory process, at this stage the subject can only answer a simple question, is there a stimulus? Discrimination is the formation of a perceptive image of a standard. When the perceptual image is formed, an identification action can be carried out. Identification is the identification of a directly perceived object with an image stored in memory, or the identification of two simultaneously perceived objects.
Properties of perception.
External phenomena that affect our senses cause a subjective effect in the form of sensations without any counter activity of the subject in relation to the perceived impact. The ability to feel is given to us and all living beings with a nervous system from birth. Only humans and higher animals are endowed with the ability to perceive the world in the form of images; it develops and improves in them through life experience.
In contrast to sensations, which are not perceived as properties of objects, specific phenomena or processes occurring outside and independently of us, perception always appears as subjectively correlated with the reality existing outside of us, framed in the form of objects, and even in the case when we have dealing with illusions or when the perceived property is relatively elementary, causing a simple sensation (in this case, this sensation necessarily relates to some phenomenon or object, is associated with it).
Sensations are located in ourselves, while the perceived properties of objects, their images, are localized in space. This process, characteristic of perception in its difference from sensations, is called objectification.
Another difference between perception in its developed forms and sensations is that the result of the occurrence of sensation is a certain feeling (for example, sensations of brightness, loudness, saltiness, pitch, balance, etc.), while as a result of perception there is a an image that includes a complex of various interrelated sensations attributed by human consciousness to an object, phenomenon, or process. In order for a certain object to be perceived, it is necessary to perform some kind of counter-activity in relation to it, aimed at studying it, constructing and clarifying the image. As a rule, this is not required for the sensation to appear.
Individual sensations are, as it were, “tied” to specific analyzers, and the impact of a stimulus on their peripheral organs - receptors - is sufficient for the sensation to arise. The image that emerges as a result of the perception process presupposes the interaction and coordinated work of several analyzers at once. Depending on which one works
more actively, processes more information, receives the most significant signs indicating the properties of the perceived object, and distinguishes between types of perception. Accordingly, they allocate visual, auditory, tactile perception . Four analyzers - visual, auditory, skin and muscle - most often act as leaders in the process of perception.
Perception, thus, acts as a meaningful (including decision-making) and meaningful (associated with speech) synthesis of various sensations obtained from integral objects or complex phenomena perceived as a whole. This synthesis appears in the form of an image of a given object or phenomenon, which develops during their active reflection.
Subjectivity, integrity, constancy and categoricality (meaningfulness and meaning) are the main properties of the image that develop in the process and result of perception. Subjectness b - This is a person’s ability to perceive the world not in the form of a set of unrelated sensations, but in the form of objects separated from each other that have properties that cause these sensations. Integrity perception is expressed in the fact that the image of perceived objects is not given in a completely finished form with all the necessary elements, but is, as it were, mentally completed to some holistic form based on a small set of elements. This also happens if some details of an object are not directly perceived by a person at a given moment in time. Constancy is defined as the ability to perceive objects as relatively constant in shape, color and size, and a number of other parameters, regardless of the changing physical conditions of perception. Categoricality human perception is manifested in the fact that it is of a generalized nature, and we designate each perceived object with a word-concept and assign it to a specific class. In accordance with this class, we look for and see in the perceived object signs that are characteristic of all objects of this class and are expressed in the volume and content of this concept.
The described properties of objectivity, integrity, constancy and categorical perception are not inherent in a person from birth; they gradually develop in life experience, partly being a natural consequence of the work of analyzers, the synthetic activity of the brain.. Also highlights Structurality b- perception is not a simple sum of sensations. We perceive a generalized structure actually abstracted from these sensations . Meaningfulness - perception is closely related to thinking, to understanding the essence of objects. Selectivity – manifests itself in the preferential selection of some objects over others.
Most often and most of all, the properties of perception have been studied using the example of vision, the leading sensory organ in humans. Representatives of Gestalt psychology - directions of scientific research that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. in Germany. One of the first to propose a classification of factors influencing the organization of visual sensations into images in line with Gestalt psychology was M. Wertheimer. The factors he identified are:
1. The proximity to each other of the elements of the visual field that caused the corresponding sensations. The closer to each other spatially in the visual field the corresponding elements are located, the more likely they are to combine with each other and create a single image.
2. Similarity of elements to each other. This property is manifested in the fact that similar elements tend to unite.
3. The "natural continuation" factor. It manifests itself in the fact that elements that appear as parts of figures, contours and shapes familiar to us are more likely in our minds to be combined into precisely these figures, shapes and contours than into others.
4. Closedness. This property of visual perception acts as the desire of the elements of the visual field to create holistic, closed images.
It turned out that a person’s perception of more complex, meaningful images occurs differently. Here, first of all, the mechanism of the influence of past experience and thinking is triggered, highlighting the most informative places in the perceived image, on the basis of which, by correlating the information received with memory, one can form a holistic idea about it. An analysis of recordings of eye movements carried out by A.L. Yarbus showed that the elements of planar images that attract a person’s attention contain areas that carry the most interesting and useful information for the perceiver. Upon careful study of such elements, on which the gaze is most focused in the process of viewing paintings, it is discovered that eye movements actually reflect the process of human thinking. It has been established that when examining a human face, the observer pays most attention to the eyes, lips and nose (Fig. 37, 38). The eyes and lips of a person are indeed the most expressive and moving elements of the face, by the nature and movements of which we judge a person’s psychology and his condition.They can tell the observer a lot about a person’s mood, his character, attitude towards people around him and much more.
Often, when perceiving contour and hatched images, as well as corresponding elements of real objects, a person may experience visual illusions. The presence of illusions in the sphere of perception, which can be caused by a variety of reasons, depending both on the state of the perceiving system and on the peculiarities of the organization of the perceived material, explains many errors, including “visions” of the so-called unidentified flying objects (UFOs), about which In recent years, a lot has been written in the press.
TYPES OF PERCEPTION.
Let us dwell briefly on the mechanisms of perception of space, time and movement, which, together with the methods of perceiving the contours and content of meaningful figures of a planar type
form a black and white perceptual dynamic picture of the environment surrounding a person every day. The perception of space contains estimates of shape, size, distance to objects, distance between objects.
IN perception of the shape of objects Three main groups of factors are involved:
1. The innate ability of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex to selectively respond to image elements that have a certain saturation, orientation, configuration and length. Such cells are called detector cells. Thanks to the properties of their receptive fields, they highlight very specific elements in the visual field, for example, light lines of a specific length, width and slope, sharp corners, contrasts, and breaks in contour images.
2. The laws of the formation of figures, forms and contours, identified by Gestalt psychologists and described above.
3. Life experience gained through hand movements along the contour and surface of objects, movement of a person and parts of his body in space.
Perception of the size of objects depends on the parameters of their image on the retina. If a person is not able to correctly estimate the distance to objects, then those of them that are actually far away and, therefore, form small images on the retina, are perceived by the person as small, although in fact they may be quite large. Those objects whose images on the retina increase are also subjectively perceived as increasing, although in reality their size may not increase. However, if a person is able to correctly estimate the distance to an object, then the law of constancy comes into play, according to which the apparent size of an object changes little with not very large changes in the distance to it or does not change at all. The same thing happens if a person knows that the object itself changes little, and only the size of its image on the retina varies.
In the perception of the size of objects, the muscles of the eyes and hand (in the case when a person feels an object with its help), and a number of other parts of the body take part. The more the muscle that traces an object along its contour or surface contracts or relaxes, the larger the object itself appears to a person. Consequently, the perception of magnitude correlates with the degree of contraction of the muscles following it. This, in particular, reveals the role of activity in perception.
Perception and evaluation of movement are also based on the consistent use of information coming from several different sources. Some of them allow you to establish the very fact of movement, others to evaluate its direction and speed. The presence or absence of movement in the visual field is detected by motion or novelty detector neurons that are part of the neuro-physiological apparatus of the orienting reaction (reflex). The direction of movement can be assessed by the direction of movement of the reflected object on the surface of the retina, and can also be noted by the sequence of contraction-relaxation of a certain group of muscles of the eyes, head, and torso when performing tracking movements behind the object.
The fact that the perception of movement and its direction is physiologically connected, in particular, with the movement of the image on the retina, is proven by the existence of the illusion of movement, which usually occurs when two luminous point objects located in the field of view are illuminated one after the other at short intervals. from each other at a relatively short distance. If the time interval between the ignition of the first and second objects becomes less than 0.1 s, then the illusion of moving the light source from one position to another, from the first place to the second, appears, and the trajectory of the corresponding “movement” is even visually and illusorily traced by the subject. This phenomenon is called "fi-phenomenon."
Another argument in favor of the same conclusion about the psychophysiological mechanism of motion perception can be the so-called autokinetic effect. This phenomenon is the apparent, illusory movement of a stationary luminous point in the dark. In particular, an experiment with a group of people, which was discussed in the third chapter of the textbook, was based on it. The autokinetic effect occurs in many people if a fixed point in the visual field is the only visible object, that is, if its position cannot be identified in space, compared and assessed relative to any other visible object.
Movement speed, Apparently, it is assessed by the speed of movement of the image of an object on the retina, as well as by the speed of contraction of the muscles involved in tracking movements.
The mechanism of human perception of time often associated with the so-called “biological clock” - a certain sequence and rhythm of biological metabolic processes occurring in the human body. The most likely candidates for the role of a biological clock are the rhythm of cardiac activity and metabolism (metabolic processes) of the body. The latter is partially confirmed by the fact that when exposed to medications that affect the speed of metabolic processes, the perception of time may change. For example, quinine and alcohol most often slow down the subjectively perceived passage of time, while caffeine speeds it up.
The subjective length of time depends in part on what it is filled with. Interesting and meaningful activities seem to us shorter in time. The one that is filled with meaningless and uninteresting activities lasts much longer for our perception. In one experiment, a person spent four days in isolation, being in a soundproof room and doing whatever he wanted during that time. At certain intervals, the experimenter called him and asked what time it was (the subject himself did not have a watch). It turned out that during the first day of his stay in these conditions, when the subject was still finding interesting activities for himself, his subjective time accelerated and ran ahead by almost four hours. Then his “internal clock” gradually began to lag behind and by the end of the fourth day of his stay in isolation it was already off by about forty minutes compared to real time.
There are large individual, particularly age, differences in the perception of the passage of time. In addition, for the same person, time estimates can vary widely depending on his mental and physical state. When you are in a good mood, time passes a little faster than usual, and when you are frustrated or depressed, it moves slower.
PERCEPTION CONSCIOUS, SUBCONSCIOUS, INTENTIONAL AND UNINTENTIONAL,
As you know, signal reception can occur at 2 levels. At a lower level, the energy around us affects our senses, and as soon as the energy of the stimuli becomes sufficient to excite one of the receptors, it turns into a coded message that will be transmitted to the brain. This limit is called the physiological threshold. For more high level The signal, in order to be perceived, must then exceed another threshold—the perception threshold. So, between these 2 thresholds there is a zone of sensitivity in which the stimulation of receptors entails the transmission of a message, but it does not reach consciousness. These signals enter the brain and are processed by the lower centers of the brain (subconscious, subliminal perception.)
Depending on the purposeful nature of the individual’s activity, perception is divided into intentional (voluntary) and unintentional (involuntary). Involuntary perception is caused by both the characteristics of environmental objects (brightness, unusualness.) In intentional perception, a person sets the goal of the activity, making certain volitional efforts for the better realization of what has arisen intentions, arbitrarily selects objects of perception. Observation is understood as a purposeful, systematically carried out perception of objects in the knowledge of which a person is interested. Observation is characterized by great activity of the individual. A person does not perceive everything that catches his eye, but isolates the most important and interesting things. Systematic in nature purposeful perception makes it possible to trace a phenomenon in its development, to note its qualitative, quantitative, periodic changes.Thanks to the inclusion of active thinking in the course of observation, the main thing is separated from the unimportant, the important from the random. Thinking helps to clearly differentiate objects of perception. Thanks to observation, a connection between perception and thinking and speech is ensured. The act of observation reveals the extreme stability of a person’s voluntary attention. Observation lies in the ability to notice characteristic, but little noticeable features of objects and phenomena.
VIOLATION OF PERCEPTION.
Pseudo-hallucinations are when images are projected not into external space, but into internal space: voices sound inside the head, the vision is perceived by the mind’s eye.
Illusions are erroneous perceptions of real things or phenomena.
Main:
Functions of perception: reflection of objects and phenomena of reality in their integrity.
Physiological mechanisms of perception: reflection of integral objects and phenomena of the world in the psyche.
30. Definition of attention. Types and properties of attention.
Attention is important and necessary condition the effectiveness of all types of human activity, primarily labor and educational. The more complex and responsible the work, the more demands it places on attention.
Attention- this is the direction and concentration of consciousness, suggesting an increase in the level of sensory, intellectual or motor activity of the individual.
The emergence of attention (involuntary) is determined by physical, psychophysical and mental factors. The main conditions for its occurrence may include the qualities of stimuli, primarily their novelty for the subject.
Novelty may consist in the appearance of a previously absent stimulus, in a change physical properties current stimuli, in the weakening or cessation of their actions, in the absence of familiar stimuli, in the movement of stimuli in space (moving objects usually attract attention). Attention is attracted by everything unusual; a wide variety of stimuli, which actually have only one common property - novelty, attract attention because the reaction to them is not weakened as a result of habituation.
Attention is attracted by strong stimuli: loud sounds, bright lights and colors, strong smells. At the same time, it matters intensity irritant, i.e. the ratio of the stimulus in strength to other stimuli acting at that moment; is crucial contrast between them. This applies not only to the strength of the stimulus, but also to its other features. Thus, small objects are more likely to be noticed among large ones, a triangle - among rectangles.
Are of great importance complexity And repetition irritant.
The role of direct interest. What is interesting, entertaining, emotionally rich, exciting, causes long-term intense concentration.
Attention is aroused by stimuli that correspond to needs an individual that is significant to him.
Attention is also related to general personality orientation, preceding experience And education. For example, a new theater poster will be more likely to be noticed by a person interested in the theater, while perhaps not paying attention to the announcement of an upcoming football match. A stylist's eye is struck by a non-literary written phrase, a false note is unpleasant for a musician, and a violation of the rules of good manners is unpleasant for a socialite.
Perception - This is the reflection in a person’s consciousness of objects or phenomena during their direct impact on the senses. In the course of perception, individual sensations are ordered and combined into holistic images of things and events.
Attention is not an independent process, but only a characteristic of other mental processes (perception, memory, thinking, etc.). All of them are aimed at their object and, to one degree or another, are focused on it.
One cannot perceive without attention to what is perceived, etc. Attention merges with other mental processes, it constitutes their characteristic, but has no independent content.
VARIETIES AND FORMS OF ATTENTION,
In psychology, there is a distinction between involuntary, voluntary and post-voluntary attention.
1) Involuntary attention occurs unexpectedly, regardless of consciousness, unexpectedly, during activity or at rest. The physiological mechanism of involuntary attention is the unconditional reflex orienting activity of the brain. Its neurophysiological mechanism is excitation coming to the cortex from under the cortical areas of the cortex. Involuntary attention occurs under the condition that the strength of extraneous stimuli exceeds the strength of conscious acting influences, when subdominant excitations under certain circumstances become more intense compared to those that dominate at this moment. NV can be aroused not only by external objects and circumstances, but by their internal needs, emotional states, our aspirations, everything that worries us. NV is short-term, sometimes it can occur often interfering with leading activities.
2) Voluntary attention. - this is a person’s conscious, directed concentration on objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality, on the inner psyche. activities. PV has will as its main component. The characteristic features of PV are purposefulness, organization of activity, awareness of the sequence of actions, discipline of mental activity, and the ability to deal with extraneous distractions. By its physiological mechanism, PV has conditioned reflex activity, the ability to inhibit unnecessary movements and actions. In PV, the leading choice is the choice of the subject of concentration, methods of action, which is accompanied by a struggle of motives. The causative agent of PV is awareness of the needs, responsibilities, interests of a person, goals and methods of activity. The more distant the goal is in time, and the more complex the conditions and methods for achieving it, the less the activity itself attracts a person, the more tension of consciousness and will it requires, and therefore needs PV. 3) Post-voluntary attention - as experience and research shows, occurs as a result of conscious concentration on objects and phenomena, in the process of PT. Overcoming difficulties during voluntary concentration, a person gets used to them. , the activity itself arouses interest, and even captures the performer., attention takes on the features of involuntary concentration. PPV, the tension of will weakens, but the intensity of attention does not decrease and remains at the level of voluntary attention. Interest in activities increases, they become longer and more productive. That is why it is important in the process of activity - educational, labor - its organization and work methods to transfer voluntary attention into a post-voluntary form. Therefore, PPV contributes to the successful completion of educational tasks and a reduction in the subjective feeling of fatigue. Depending on the content of the activity, attention is directed either to external, directly given objects, or phenomena and movements of one’s own body - objects of our sensations and perceptions, or to internal ones - the psyche. activity. In this regard, external or sensory and motor, attention and internal, intellectual, are distinguished. The division of attention into external and internal is, of course, conditional. But these forms of attention have their own characteristics, which need to be paid attention to in the organization and management of educational and work activities. External attention plays a leading role in observing objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality and their reflection in consciousness. It manifests itself in an active attitude, in the appeal of the senses to the object of perception and observation.
4) External attention (sensory and motor - clearly manifested in peculiar movements of the eyes, head, facial expressions)
5) Internal, or intellectual attention is directed to the analysis of the activity of mental processes (perception, memory, imagination, thinking.)
Laws of attention.
Sustainability of attention. – characterized by the duration of concentration on objects of activity. Stability, like concentration, depends on the strength or intensity of excitation. Concentration and stability in the process of activity can be destroyed: strength and duration decreases, attention weakens, a person is distracted from the subject of the activity.
Switching attention- this is its deliberate transfer from one object to another, if this is required by the activity of the PV occurs at different speeds, this depends on the content of the activity and on individual characteristics,
Concentration of attention can be narrow and wider, when a person focuses not on one, but on several objects; with a wider concentration of attention, attention is distributed. The ability to distribute attention is common to everyone, but it has individual characteristics. There are people who find it difficult to concentrate on two types of activities, and then there are Caesar and Napoleon...
4) Attention span.A person’s attention varies in volume. The volume of attention is understood as the number of objects that can be covered by attention. If the perceived material easily evokes associations, that is, connects with each other, then the volume of attention increases.
Attention research.
The most accessible method is observation of human activity. Use of Bourdon tests - carectural test.
Violation of attention - absent-mindedness, caused by a weakening of the strength of concentration. Alternating visual, auditory and motor modalities of perception helps to overcome absent-mindedness.
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