Higher and lower mental processes

What are mental processes and what are they like?

Mental processes are one of the key concepts of modern psychology. The human psyche is considered as an integral structure, but to facilitate its study, several groups of mental phenomena are distinguished:

mental processes
mental properties
mental states

Note 1
Classification of mental phenomena is needed only from a methodological point of view, since the human psyche is one and these phenomena do not exist and do not function separately.

Mental processes are a group of mental phenomena that are united according to the functions they perform in the human mental system. Distinctive characteristics of mental processes are:

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dynamism
short duration
fast flow

All of them are a response to what is happening.

Mental processes can be:

inferior
higher

Lower mental processes are otherwise called natural. They are non-mediated and are formed without the participation of the cultural environment. At their core, they are a product of natural development. The control of these mental functions occurs involuntarily. A person cannot consciously interfere with this process. Examples of natural mental functions are:

mechanical memory
involuntary attention
generative imagination

Higher mental processes are complex systemic mental processes that are formed throughout life and have a social origin. Examples of higher mental processes include:

logical memory
voluntary attention
creative imagination
conceptual thinking
speech

Individual mental processes identified in mental activity are defined as higher mental functions.

These include thinking, speech, writing, counting, memory, voluntary movements, perceptual processes (perception processes).

Higher mental functions have specific characteristics and are formed on the basis of biological prerequisites. They develop during the child’s lifetime in the interaction of the child with adults and the surrounding world as a whole, and therefore they are socially conditioned and bear the imprint of the cultural and historical environment in which the child develops. In addition, such functions are instrumental in nature: they are carried out using various means, methods, “psychological tools,” among which speech occupies a special place. Using these tools, a person masters the ability to regulate his relationships with the objective world, other people, and masters his own behavior. For example, when memorizing a series of words using logical or figurative associations, a person introduces thinking or imagination into memory. Thus, one function mediates the optimal implementation of another; man, according to L.S. Vygotsky, collaborates with himself. The range of methods available to an individual for mediating higher mental functions is an important criterion for the degree of personality development. In this context, one of the tasks of psychocorrectional and psychotherapeutic work is to expand a person’s experience in relation to the development of an arsenal of ways to mediate their own activities. And, finally, higher mental functions are conscious of the subject and are accessible to voluntary (volitional and purposeful) regulation and self-control.

The development of higher mental functions is characterized by a certain dynamics; newer and more complex functions are built on top of earlier and simpler ones, “absorbing” them into themselves. The genesis of higher mental functions follows the path of transforming expanded visual-effective forms into abbreviated, automated ones, performed internally in the form of so-called mental actions. This aspect is important to take into account during a clinical and psychological examination of a sick child, since the pathology of higher mental functions manifests itself against the background of their incomplete formation. In addition, when diagnosing pathology in adult patients, it should be taken into account that if tasks are completed in detail using visual methods of solution, with the participation of pronunciation (i.e., there is a transfer of mental actions to the external plane), then this may indicate a deficiency, realized by the patient and overcome with the help of autocompensation.

Higher mental functions of a person are considered from the position of a structural-functional approach, in which it is important to analyze the links (components) included in them, with an assessment of the role and place of each of them in ensuring mental activity. It should be noted that the differentiated structural components of higher mental functions are provided by the work of specific (local) areas of the brain, but various functions also have common links that intersect at the level of certain brain structures. An example is the “cross-cutting” role of such a component as spatial analysis and synthesis. Thus, the processing of spatial characteristics of information is necessary for performing voluntary movements, understanding the structure of a multi-digit number and its bit structure, for performing counting operations, visual perception, solving constructive problems, understanding logical and grammatical structures that reflect spatial relationships in the form of prepositions, case endings, etc. .P.

Thus, such higher mental functions as voluntary movements, thinking, speech, writing, counting and perceptual processes “converge” on spatial analysis and synthesis. At the same time, it is known that this component of the psyche is associated with the work of the parietal-temporal-occipital region of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Damage to this zone (for example, in Alzheimer's disease) leads to the development of a complex of symptoms reflecting violations of these mental functions, since in this case the common factor of spatial organization of mental processes becomes deficient. Other components of mental processes can simultaneously remain intact provided that other areas of the brain function normally. Thus, when examining patients, it is not so much the symptoms of mental disorders themselves that become significant, but rather the psychological qualification of the symptoms, aimed at identifying the pathological link in the holistic systemic structure of the psyche. In turn, the establishment of this link allows us to draw a conclusion about the general cause of disorders of various mental processes, i.e. draw a conclusion about the mechanisms of formation of clinical and psychological symptoms and their natural combination into a syndrome. On this basis, a syndromic clinical and psychological method for studying disorders of higher mental functions is built.

Lower mental processes

Mechanical memory is one of the types of natural or lower psychological processes. Information is remembered directly in the form in which it is presented, that is, the form of information is memorized directly. The neural connections of the first signaling system provide human mechanical memory. The logical and semantic content of the information remains in the shadows.

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Involuntary attention compared to voluntary attention is a lower form of attention. It occurs when one of the analyzers is affected by a certain stimulus. The stimulus may arise unexpectedly, may have a strong impact, and the novelty of the stimulus also affects the mechanism of involuntary memory formation. The causes of involuntary attention include the internal state of a person.

Reproducing imagination in its essence is visual memory. When this process works, a person reproduces a number of images that we have experienced, but they arise spontaneously. An image can be represented by objects, phenomena, and actions. The reproducing imagination is also called reproductive.

What are higher mental functions

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Traditionally, the highest psychological functions are attributed to those that have passed through the influence of society. That is, not innate, primordial, but formed in the course of cultural and social formation.

VPF can be called:

perception,
imagination,
memory,
thinking,
speech.

Despite the fact that many believe that higher psychological functions are the exclusive privilege of humanity, scientists have confirmed that this is not entirely true. Their manifestations are found in higher primates, cetaceans, some birds and, what seems surprising, cephalopods. So we can suggest that not only the huge path of human development is associated with HPF.

Theory of mental development by L. S. Vygotsky

L.S. Vygotsky was the first to put forward (1927) the position that the historical approach should become the leading principle for constructing human psychology. He gave a theoretical criticism of the biological, naturalistic concepts of man, contrasting them with his theory of cultural and historical development. The most important thing was that he introduced the idea of historicism of the nature of the human psyche, the idea of transforming the natural mechanisms of mental processes in the course of socio-historical and ontogenetic development into specific psychological research. This transformation was understood by L. S. Vygotsky as a necessary result of a person’s assimilation of the products of human culture in the process of his communication with the people around him.

L.S. Vygotsky wrote that during ontogenesis, the entire uniqueness of the transition from one system of activity (animal) to another (human), made by a child, lies in the fact that one system not only replaces the other, but both systems develop simultaneously and together: a fact that has no similar neither in the history of animal development nor in the history of human development.

If in the biological development of man the organic system of activity dominates, and in historical development - the instrumental system of activity, if in phylogenesis, therefore, both systems are represented separately and developed separately from one another, then in ontogenesis - and this alone, bringing together both plans for the development of behavior : animal and human, makes the entire theory of biogenetic recapitulation completely untenable - both systems develop simultaneously and together. This means that in ontogenesis the development of the activity system reveals a dual conditionality.

As is known, L. S. Vygotsky based his research on the following two hypotheses: the hypothesis about the indirect nature of human mental functions and the hypothesis about the origin of internal mental processes from initially external and “interpsychological” activity.

According to the interiorization hypothesis, mental activity initially comes from external activity through interiorization (growing inward) and stores its most important features, which include instrumentality and sociality. The “search” for these two most important features in the content of mental activity led L. S. Vygotsky to the formulation of these hypotheses and the law of the formation of higher mental functions. He called higher mental functions (speech, voluntary attention, voluntary memory, objective perception, conceptual thinking) historical, voluntary and indirect. In this case, voluntariness was understood primarily as purposefulness: in the process of ontogenesis, the child learns to control his mental activity, remember something or pay attention to something of little interest in accordance with the goal (to remember, to pay attention).

But what allows a child to master his mental activity? L. S. Vygotsky spoke about the presence of an internal tool or means of mastery, by which he understood a sign fixed primarily in the word, the meaning of the word. L. S. Vygotsky considered speech as a universal sign system that gives the child the opportunity to master all other cognitive functions.

Thus, according to the first hypothesis, specifically human characteristics of the psyche arise due to the fact that previously direct, “natural” processes turn into mediated ones due to the inclusion of an intermediate link (“stimulus - means”) in behavior. For example, during indirect memorization, closed elementary connections are structurally combined through a mnemonic sign. In other cases, this role is fulfilled by the word.

The second hypothesis, simultaneously put forward by L. S. Vygotsky, was also of fundamental importance, according to which the mediated structure of the mental process is initially formed under conditions when the mediating link has the form of an external stimulus (and, therefore, when the corresponding process also has an external form). This position made it possible to understand the social origin of a new structure that does not arise from within and is not invented, but is necessarily formed through communication, which in humans is always indirect.

L. S. Vygotsky wrote that everything internal in higher forms was originally external, that is, it was for others what it is now for oneself. Every higher mental function necessarily passes through an external stage of development. To say “external” about a process means to say “social”. Every higher mental function was external because it was social before it became an internal, properly mental function; it was first a social relationship between two people. L. S. Vygotsky formulated the general genetic law of cultural development in the following form: every function in the cultural development of a child appears on the scene twice, on two levels, first social, then psychological, first between people as an interpsychic category, then within the child as a category intrapsychic. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, to the formation of concepts, to the development of the will. Behind all higher functions and their relationships are genetically the social relationships of people.

The very mechanism underlying higher mental functions is a copy of the social. All higher mental functions are internalized relations of the social order, the basis of the social structure of the individual. Their composition, genetic structure, mode of action - in a word, their whole nature is social; even turning into mental processes, it remains quasi-social. A person even when alone with himself retains the function of communication. Thus, according to this law, the mental nature of a person represents a set of social relations, transferred internally and becoming functions of the personality and forms of its structure.

According to the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, developed by his students A. N. Leontyev and A. R. Luria, through the organization of external activity, it is possible and should organize internal activity, that is, the actual self-developing mental processes.

Interiorization occurs through the “appropriation” by the psyche of the structures of external activity, its mastery in the course of jointly distributed work with the “other” (where the “other” is not an external moment, but the most important structural component of this process), with the developing activity of the individual, his self-movement, self-development. It is this self-development of the internal structures of activity that forms the real psychological background against which education is placed as the formation of personality. Thus, in accordance with the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky, the development of the psyche in ontogenesis can be represented as a process of the child’s appropriation of socio-historical methods of external and internal activity.

In conclusion of the analysis of the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, we present its main provisions, summarized by his student and follower A. N. Leontyev. “The indirect structure of mental processes always arises on the basis of the assimilation by an individual person of such forms of behavior that initially develop as forms of directly social behavior. In this case, the individual masters the link (“stimulus - means”) that mediates this process, be it a material means (tool), or socially developed verbal concepts, or some other signs. Thus, another fundamental proposition was introduced into psychology - the proposition that the main mechanism of the human psyche is the mechanism for assimilating social, historically established types and forms of activity. Since in this case activity can only occur in its external expression, it was assumed that the processes acquired in their external form are further transformed into internal, mental processes.”

The cultural-historical concept helped L. S. Vygotsky formulate a number of laws of child mental development. The most important among them, as already mentioned, is the law of the formation of higher mental functions. Let us recall that, according to this law, higher mental functions arise initially as a form of collective behavior, as a form of cooperation with other people, and only subsequently do they become internal individual (forms) of functions of the child himself. Distinctive features of higher mental functions: indirectness, awareness, arbitrariness, systematicity; they are formed intravitally; they are formed as a result of mastering special tools, means developed during the historical development of society; the development of external mental functions is associated with learning in the broad sense of the word; it cannot occur otherwise than in the form of assimilation of given patterns, therefore this development goes through a number of stages.

Closely related to this law and developing its content is the law of uneven child development, according to which each side in the child’s psyche has its own optimal period of development. This period in developmental psychology is called the sensitive period. Age-related sensitivity is an optimal combination of conditions inherent in a certain age period for the development of certain mental properties and processes. Premature or delayed training in relation to the sensitive period may not be effective enough, which adversely affects the development of the psyche. Thus, during sensitive periods, the child is especially sensitive to learning and the development of certain functions. Why is this happening? L. S. Vygotsky explains the essence of age-related sensitivity in his hypothesis about the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness. The systemic structure of consciousness is the structure of individual mental processes (perception, memory, thinking, etc.), in which at a given stage of development some process occupies a decisive place. At one stage this place is occupied by perception, at the next by memory, etc.

Such qualitative changes in consciousness are inseparable from changes in its semantic structure, by which L. S. Vygotsky understood the structure of generalization characteristic of each stage of development. Thanks to this understanding of mental development, L. S. Vygotsky turned the thesis into a theory: a child is not a small adult.

The concept of sensitive ages and the hypothesis about the systemic structure of consciousness were of great importance for understanding the patterns of child mental development and the role of learning in this process. It turned out that no function develops in isolation: the timing and nature of the development of each function depend on what place it occupies in the overall structure of functions. Each mental function in its sensitive period forms the center of this system, and all other mental processes develop in each period under the influence of this formative function in consciousness. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the process of mental development consists of a restructuring of the systemic structure of consciousness, which is caused by changes in its semantic structure.

Thus, the first significant stage of development - from one to three years - is sensitive for the development of speech. By mastering speech, the child receives a system of means of mastering other functions, which L. S. Vygotsky called historical, voluntary, meaningful. This process is carried out only during the learning process. If a child at this age is brought up in a speech-poor environment, this leads to a noticeable lag in speech development, and subsequently in other cognitive functions. From two to four years is a sensitive period for the development of object perception, senior preschool age is a sensitive period for the development of voluntary memory, and junior school age is for the development of conceptual thinking. As for voluntary attention, L. S. Vygotsky considers preschool age to be a sensitive period of development, but numerous experimental studies show that this function in motion sickness begins to form no earlier than five years.

The analysis of the laws of mental development, formulated by L. S. Vygotsky, allows us to reveal the essence of perhaps the most important problem in Russian developmental and educational psychology - the problem of learning and development.

One of the fundamental ideas of L. S. Vygotsky is that in the development of a child’s behavior it is necessary to distinguish between two intertwined lines. One is natural “maturation.” The other is cultural improvement, mastery of cultural ways of behavior and thinking.

Cultural development consists of mastering such auxiliary means of behavior that humanity created in the process of its historical development and such as language, writing, number system, etc.; cultural development is associated with the assimilation of behavioral techniques that are based on the use of signs as a means for carrying out one or another psychological operation. Culture modifies nature in accordance with human goals: the method of action, the structure of the technique, the entire structure of psychological operations changes, just as the inclusion of a tool rearranges the entire structure of the labor operation. The child’s external activity can turn into internal activity; the external technique, as it were, grows and becomes internal (interiorized).

L. S. Vygotsky owns two important concepts that define each stage of age development - the concept of the social situation of development and the concept of new formation.

By the social situation of development, L. S. Vygotsky meant the unique, age-specific, exclusive, unique and inimitable relationship that develops at the beginning of each new stage between a person and the reality around him, primarily social. The social situation of development represents the starting point for all changes possible in a given period, and determines the path by which a person acquires high-quality developmental formations.

L. S. Vygotsky defined a new formation as a qualitatively new type of personality and human interaction with reality, absent as a whole at the previous stages of its development.

L. S. Vygotsky established that a child in mastering himself (his behavior) follows the same path as in mastering external nature, i.e. from outside. He masters himself as one of the forces of nature, with the help of a special cultural technique of signs. A child who has changed the structure of his personality is already a different child, whose social existence cannot but differ significantly from the existence of a child of an earlier age.

A leap in development (a change in the social situation of development) and the emergence of new formations are caused by fundamental developmental contradictions that develop towards the end of each segment of life and “push” development forward (for example, between maximum openness to communication and the absence of a means of communication - speech in infancy; between the growth of subject skills and the inability to implement them in “adult” activities in preschool age, etc.).

Accordingly, L. S. Vygotsky defined age as an objective category to designate three points:

chronological framework of a particular stage of development;
a specific social development situation emerging at a specific stage of development;
qualitative new formations arising under its influence.

In his periodization of development, he suggests alternating stable and critical ages. In stable periods (infancy, early childhood, preschool age, primary school age, adolescence, etc.) there is a slow and steady accumulation of minute quantitative changes in development, and in critical periods (newborn crisis™, crisis of the first year of life, crisis of three years, crisis of seven years, puberty crisis, crisis of 17 years, etc.) these changes are detected in the form of abruptly occurring irreversible neoplasms.

At each stage of development there is always a central new formation, as if leading the entire development process and characterizing the restructuring of the child’s entire personality as a whole on a new basis. Around the main (central) neoplasm of a given age, all other partial neoplasms related to individual aspects of the child’s personality, and developmental processes associated with neoplasms of previous ages, are located and grouped.

L. S. Vygotsky calls those developmental processes that are more or less directly related to the main new formation the central lines of development at a given age, and calls all other partial processes and changes occurring at a given age secondary lines of development. It goes without saying that the processes that were the central lines of development at a given age become side lines in the next, and vice versa - the side lines of the previous age are brought to the fore and become central lines in the new one, as their meaning and specific weight in the overall structure change. development, their attitude towards the central neoplasm changes. Consequently, during the transition from one stage to another, the entire age structure is rebuilt. Each age has a specific, unique and unrepeatable structure.

Understanding development as a continuous process of self-movement, continuous emergence and formation of something new, he believed that new formations of “critical” periods are not subsequently preserved in the form in which they arise during the critical period, and are not included as a necessary component in the integral structure of the future personality. They die off, being absorbed by new formations of the next (stable) age, being included in their composition, dissolving and transforming into them.

Enormous multilateral work led L. S. Vygotsky to construct the concept of the connection between learning and development, one of the fundamental concepts of which is the zone of proximal development.

We determine by tests or other means the level of mental development of the child. But at the same time, it is completely insufficient to take into account what the child can and does today and now; it is important what he can and will be able to do tomorrow, what processes, even if not completed today, are already “ripening.” Sometimes, in order to solve a problem, a child needs a guiding question, an indication of how to solve it, etc. Then imitation arises, as everything that the child cannot do on his own, but which he can learn or which he can perform under the guidance or in collaboration with another, older or more knowledgeable person. But what a child can do today in cooperation and under guidance, tomorrow he becomes able to do independently. By examining what a child is able to accomplish independently, we are examining the development of yesterday. By examining what a child is capable of accomplishing in cooperation, we determine the development of tomorrow—the zone of proximal development.

L. S. Vygotsky criticizes the position of researchers who believe that a child must reach a certain level of development, his functions must mature, before learning can begin. It turns out, he believed, that learning “lags behind” development, development always goes ahead of learning, learning is simply built on top of development, without changing anything in essence.

L. S. Vygotsky proposed a completely opposite position: only that learning is good which is ahead of development, creating a zone of proximal development. Education is not development, but an internally necessary and universal moment in the process of development in a child of not natural, but cultural and historical characteristics of a person. In training, the prerequisites for future new formations are created, and in order to create a zone of proximal development, i.e. give rise to a number of internal development processes, properly constructed learning processes are needed.