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Perceptual and cognitive development of preschoolers in Soviet psychology
CONTEMPORARY
EDUCATIONAL
PSYCHOLOGY
5,
140- 149 (19801
Perceptual and Cognitive Development Preschoolers in Soviet Psychology
of
HERBERT L. PICK, JR. Unilwsity
of Minrwsotri
It is very fitting that we are meeting here today to discuss Soviet educational psychology because it provides an opportunity to acknowledge the work of Alexei Nikolaevich Leont’ev who died January 22 of this year. Although Leont’ev was not primarily an educational psychologist, his ideas were a dominant force in all aspects of Soviet psychology in recent years. His own writing ranged from general experimental psychology (especially perception) to applied psychology to developmental psychology. In recent years he elaborated a very influential theory of activity (Leont’ev, 1975). I don’t want to discuss in detail Leont’ev’s theory of activity, but it is important to note that the epistemological emphasis on activity of Marx and Engels was applied by Vygotsky and later by Leont’ev to cognition and cognitive development. This application was combined with a further stressing of the importance of cultural and social influences on these aspects of development-also consistent with Marx. Although in the early history of postrevolution Soviet psychology there was a strong behaviorist tradition, which was given further impetus by the great prestige of Pavlov and his work on conditioned reflexes, the Vygotsky-Leont’ev theory of activity was never behavioristic. It always included mental activities and operations as well as mental elements: images, ideas, and representations, much as does Piaget’s approach. One aspect of the background of the theory of activity concerning the current perceptual and cognitive work which I do want to discuss is a trend that was manifest in the late fifties and early sixties and was even reflected in Leont’ev’s address as president of the 1966 International Congress of Psychology in Moscow. This was a motor-copy theory of perception in some respects similar to the acquired distinctiveness and acquired The preparation of this paper was supported by a Program Project Grant HD 050207 from the National Institutes of Health to the Institute of Child Development of the University of Minnesota and by the Center for Research in Human Learning of the University of Minnesota. The work of the Center is supported by Research Grants from the National Science Foundation and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Familiarity with the material in this paper was largely gained while the author held a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship at Moscow State University during the spring of 1978 under the auspices of the Council of International Exchange of Scholars. 140 0361-476X/80/020140-10$02.00/0 Copyright 0 1980 by Academic Press, Inc. AU rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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equivalence concepts of American learning theory of the time. Like those concepts, the Soviet theory proposed that any given percept was based on a combination of the initial stimulation impinging on the receptors and the self-produced stimulation resulting from the reaction of the organism to that stimulation. Perception was mediated. Unlike the American concept of mediation, the Soviets suggested that the self-reaction of the organism must in some sense copy the form of the external stimulus. This idea resulted in quite a body of research concerned with eye and hand movements of children as they engaged in perceptual tasks. The hypothesis was that these movements would match the shape of the objects being perceived, particularly as the perception became more veridical. On the basis of Western eye movement literature, there was little reason to expect this to happen (and indeed one sometimes suspects that the Soviets pursued this line so avidly because of the political pressures of the time). Generally, the Soviets didn’t find their hypothesized results either. They did find that children as a function of age progressed from exploring chaotically to exploring systematically albeit more and more briefly in various perceptual tasks. This work was done by Zaporozhets and his colleagues, especially V. P. Zinchenko and Ruzskaya. Zinchenko himself collected some rather convincing data with adults that perception even of novel objects can be quite adequate without copying movements. Zinchenko and Vergiles (1969) presented Chinese characters in a perceptual task to subjects under conditions of stabilized retinal images. Here eye movements when they occurred would not result in copying feedback. Nevertheless, subjects were able to perform the tasks. It is to the Soviet psychologists’ credit that they left this blind alley. However, some of their results which concerned how people engaged in perceptual tasks were interesting and the activity component has been preserved without the copying component. Much of the basic research on preschool children’s perceptual and cognitive development is carried out at the Institute of Preschool Education in Moscow under the direction of A. V. Zaporozhets. The work that I will be discussing today is primarily that of L. A. Venger, N. N. Poddyakov, and D. B. El’konin. Venger has been most concerned with perceptual development, and his recent research will be discussed first. Poddyakov is primarily interested in the cognitive development of preschool children and, for purposes of this paper, his approach follows nicely that of Venger. It begins by emphasizing the role of practical action in children’s thinking. El’konin has recently completed a book on children’s play in which he draws a number of implications for cognitive development. These will be discussed briefly. Venger was one of the researchers involved with the motor-copy theory of perception and perceptual development, and his approach still em-
142
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L.
PICK,
JR.
phasizes the role of activity in perceptual development. One of his major emphases is on the exploratory acts which are involved in the initial perception of any object or event and how these lead to adequate perception. In this regard a scheme developed by N. P. Sakulina (1965) in the study of children’s artistic performance captures much of Venger’s flavor. This scheme was actually developed to train preschoolers in perceptual analysis so that they would generate adequate images of objects that they were viewing. The first step is to examine the overall shape of the object. This is followed by distinguishing the basic parts of the object and defining their character (form, size, etc.). The third step is defining the interrelations of these parts to each other (especially spatial relations). The fourth step is isolating the minor parts and establishing their spatial relations to the major parts. Finally, a reexamination of the whole object is required. The educational goal is to train children to apply this scheme in the given order so that they don’t forget any of the steps and because the logic of the scheme requires that. This kind of scheme is based on many years of analysis of perceptual activities and from such study Venger has moved to an analysis of the genesis of sensory abilities (Venger, 1976). Venger views these sensory abilities or capacities, as he prefers to call them, as the origin of real talent or giftedness in areas which seem to rely heavily on perceptual ability-fields such as art and music. He regards these capacities as perceptual components of the more complex general activity. With an optimism and a pragmatic orientation which is typical for Soviet psychology, the hope is to trace the development of these capacities, understand their underlying mechanism, and to develop instructional techniques which will increase all children’s achievement in the target areas. In analyzing these areas, Venger focused on sensory capacities which seemed to be central. Thus, for artistic activity, such problems as the perception of projective size and form were investigated and for music, the perception of rhythm. I will illustrate the approach by describing the type of investigation carried out to see to what extent children are able to perceive the projective size of objects. It seems obvious that artistic representation requires the perception and reproduction of projective size. In addition, Venger finds support for this assertion in the literature. However, there has been very little research done on the problem. Indeed, the focus of research has been on the opposite; that is, on the problem of constancy. Constancy according to the classical view involves correction of the projective image on the retina to take into account the point of view and distance of the observer. How would perception be without this correction and would it be possible to get children of preschool age to so perceive? This is Venger’s theoretical problem. His practical problem is how to ascertain whether children understand, when questioned, the difference between real size and projec-
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tive size. In order to report that they see a difference in projective size, they must know what this means; but, in order to understand what such a difference means, they have to be able to see such a difference. Basically, what Venger did was to train children to align the tops and bottoms of the projections of figures at different distances in the field of view, thus equating their visual angle. He also had subjects adjust the distance of an object so that its image just filled a frame and in that respect matched another identically shaped object of different size and distance. In short, the children used a frame to match the projective sizes. After such practice, they were able to make fairly good projective matches by eye. Before such preliminary practice and instruction, the children were strongly influenced by the real size. That is, they exhibited considerable constancy. Their projective size judgments were not as good as those obtained under reduced conditions; that is, under conditions when there were no cues for distance available and the only way the children could make matches of two objects was on the basis of projective size. In order to achieve almost that level of performance, it was necessary to do a training experiment in which children were asked to make a match and then a frame was introduced so that they could see how close the standard and comparison figures were to occupying the same amount of the frame. Other training strategies were also tried with approximately the same results. (This strategy, by the way, is quite typical of Soviet developmental research-a normative experiment first to see what children’s behavior is ordinarily like, then a training experiment to see if the function can be improved. It is typical that in the interpretation of the training experiment the Soviets see the effect of the social-cultural environment on the child’s perception and thinking. It is this effect of society which determines what aspects of a situation are attended to and how the child goes about acquiring information necessary to solve a task.) It is not obvious how much the training procedure in this experiment has modified the perception of the child in the sense of whether they are able to see the projective size of objects as opposed to whether they have simply learned a technique for achieving a “correct” match. This issue depends a bit on how one defines perception and where one draws the line between perception and cognition. The Soviets in general tend to draw that line further in the direction of cognition than we do. The line actually becomes quite blurred as we next consider the work of Poddyakov on the cognitive development of preschool children. Poddyakov (1977) focuses on two forms of early thinking: visual-action thinking and visual-image thinking. He sees these as precursors of later conceptual thinking. They are by definition very closely tied to perceptual processes. Visual-action thinking refers to problem solving by actual manipulation of objects in order to gain more information about the situa-
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tion often in the act of resolving the problem. Thus, the hallmark of visual-action thinking is practical action. In contrast, visual-image thinking is something like Arnheim’s visual thinking. It also involves transformations on objects, but these are mental operations and have the advantage of freedom from physical constraints of real situations. Conceptually, it is important to note that while there is a developmental progression from visual-action to visual-image thinking to conceptual thinking, in fact all forms are present in adults where they are useful and maybe even necessary. VISUAL-ACTION
THINKING
Since visual-action thinking is so closely tied to practical action, it is necessary to discuss what is meant by practical action. All external material acts which produce a transformation of the situation are considered practical actions. These are distinguished from, for example, communicative acts by hand or voice which don’t directly transform the situation. Practical actions are further subdivided into those that are undertaken directly to have a practical effect; i.e., are executive or instrumental, and those that are undertaken to gain information; i.e., are cognitive actions. That information itself might or might not be relevant to a practical task. An experimental illustration of this conceptualization involved an apparatus in which a doll could be moved around a board by remote control. The doll’s motion was controlled by four buttons on a little console. Each button moved the doll in one of four directions: back, forth, right, or left. The children’s task was to move the doll along a path to a goal box. Initially children were not given any special instruction about how the apparatus worked other than being shown that the buttons were to be used to move the doll around. Children between 3 and 7 years tried the task. The youngest simply played with the buttons and moving the doll but didn’t relate their activity at all to the task. Their behavior was not studied further. The 4 to 5 year olds realized right away that they had to solve a subtask of finding the correct button to push. They did this by actually moving the doll considerable distances, showing rather long durations of presses and rather variable time between button presses. When the 4 to 5 year olds pressed an incorrect button, they tended to become interested in the movement of the doll itself and not notice it was going in the wrong direction until it had moved a considerable distance. The 5 to 6 year olds started off pressing with durations (rather long) of 1 to 2 set; but, in contrast to the 4 to 5 year olds, the duration of presses was quickly reduced to 0.4 to 0.8 sec. Also, they didn’t express any negative reaction when the doll moved in an incorrect direction. Their probing presses had a cognitive aim rather than executive. With the 4 to 5 year olds the stage of the probe trials was reached only slowly. Even when the duration of their
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presses had become quite short, their negative emotional reactions to an incorrect direction of movement suggested that the presses, while practical actions, were still executive rather than cognitive. A final feature distinguishing cognitive type probe trials from the executive type is the fact that the decision as to whether the direction of movement was correct or not was made after the trial ended in the case of the probe trial and during the movement in the case of the executive trials. Besides illustrating different types of practical activity, this example also illustrates nicely a type of qualitative analysis of behavior which is characteristic of the Soviets’ interpretation of their data. Continuing the investigation of visual-action thinking, the same apparatus was used to study the formation of a generalized means of problem solving in such situations. The question was whether children would learn to undertake practical actions in problem solving which are purely cognitive in nature unrelated to any specific goal such as moving a doll along a particular path. In the previous experiment, children didn’t know which button controlled which motion and they had to determine this by trial and error. In a subsequent experiment, the movement controlled by each button was coded by a pointer on the board so the child could anticipate which button to try next. They readily learned this specific set of associations, but its functioning was still at a low level in the sense that if the functional significance of buttons was changed, they resorted to trial and error behavior. In order to achieve generalization in their use of coding strategies, it was necessary to start with actions which were executive, then to gradually fade out their initial executive significance leaving only their cognitive significance. To do this, 4 to 5 year old children were taught to place a coding indicator by each button. To start with, the experimenter had placed the indicators in position and after the children had used them they were removed and the children were asked to replace them. When they didn’t know how to do this, they were taught to press a button to see the direction of movement, then place the indicator by the button. (How the indicator itself should be oriented-it was pointer shaped-posed a bit of a problem. To get this correct, children learned to use a mediation technique moving their hand in the particular direction of the doll movement, then placing the point of the indicator in that direction, a form of motor mediation.) Now the children had a generalized means of coding the significance of the buttons and any particular problem of the same type; i.e., when the indicators were removed and the function of the buttons rearranged. They had to be especially instructed to do so and then could accomplish it. Older children (5 to 6 years) once taught to place their own indicators spontaneously used the technique in new problems und in fact were almost bored by the practical executive problem-the cognitive activity of coding the buttons had become an end
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in itself. This, in a sense, represents a pure form of visual-action thinking, thinking based on action but not tied to a specific practical goal. VISUAL-IMAGE
THINKING
The next stage in development is visual-image thinking. Zinchenko describes it as “that form of human activity, a product of which is the generation of new images, the creation of new visual forms carrying weight and having visual significance. These images are distinguished from objects of perception by their automaticity and freedom” (Zinchenko, 1973). Poddyakov tirst focused on the transition from visualaction thinking to visual-imagining thinking. Here again his approach appears to involve starting with direct sensory support for a series of actions and then fading this support out. An illustrative experimental task involved rolling a ball through a maze-like path in a box. In order to guide the ball, the box had to be tilted in various directions by means of handles on each side. Children were asked to perform this task under several conditions. One condition simply had the box covered with clear glass so that child could see the ball, path, and results of his actions. A second had the box covered with cardboard, with an outline of the maze on the cardboard so the child could see the path, but not the ball nor the results of its actions. A final condition again had the clear glass cover but the child’s task was only to tell the experimenters how to tilt the box, not to actually carry out the procedure. (The experimenter didn’t actually carry out the instructions either.) Here the child could see the ball and path but had to imagine the results of a series of acts. Performance was fine in the first condition but deteriorated in the other two, being worst in the third-verbal report-condition. The difficulty with the second condition was poor orienting toward the essential features of the task. The children started off all right but apparently couldn’t keep updating what was happening in the box. This was helped some by children using motor mediation in the form of gestures to remind themselves of the path of maze or the position of the ball in the maze. A training experiment involved an adult tilting the box and the child moving a marker along a copy of the maze to indicate the progress of the ball along the path. This procedure didn’t work using the path drawn on the top of the box as the copy. Apparently the separation of the copy of the maze path from the box emphasized for the children the difference between the modeled and the real object. The internalization of thinking has had a very important place in theoretical discussions in Soviet developmental psychology. This, of course, is closely related to their emphasis on activity. Indeed thinking is almost conceived of as the internalization of practical actions. P. Y. Gal’perin, the leading Soviet educational psychologist, has been a strong
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proponent of this view, developing an algorithm for teaching children mental acts. In his conception, such thinking as that, for example, which is involved in arithmetic consists of mentally performing the kinds of computing operations which are initially done with sets of objects. His algorithm consists of a series of steps starting with general orientation to the task, then performing the task by means of overt acts with material supports. Then these acts are overtly and completely verbalized in the performance of the task without the material supports. Finally, the verbalization is gradually abbreviated and internalized. Poddyakov’s approach differs from that of Gal’perin mainly in not following or thinking necessary the great stress on verbalization. While he acknowledges that verbalization is important and often helps in thinking, it is not essential in the visual forms of thinking he is dealing with. A final example from Poddyakov comes close to the end state of the shift to visual-image thinking. It involves the mental representation of changes in spatial position of occluded parts of objects on the basis of parts still visible. Children were asked to imagine the rotation of objects which were partially occluded by a disk. They were shown an object: a small straight stick or realistic stick-like figure, an L or an L-shaped realistic figure, e.g., in the shape of a bird. Then, the figure was covered by a disk so that only one part was visible, e.g., the bird’s head. Children were asked to point to the position of the other end. All could do this with straight figures without any particular trouble. However, when the object was rotated 180” under the disk, only half of the 4 to 5 year olds correctly located the other end of the object, with 70% of the 5 to 6 year olds, and all of the 6 to 7 year olds doing this. Those who did locate the opposite end correctly could also do so under 90” and 270” rotation but under rotation to oblique angles such as 45” or 225” even the 6 to 7 year olds had considerable difficulty. The L-shaped figures were, as might be expected, significantly more difficult than the straight figures and possibly surprisingly the naturalistic figures were easier than the more abstract line figures. Observation of the children indicated that before answering they often moved their hands or ran their eyes along the hidden areas of the figures. This is again motor mediation somewhat reminiscent of the motor-copy theory. In this case, no particular training experiment was done but children’s performance did simply improve with practice. Thus, we have traced, by example, one type of children’s thinking from practical executive actions to practical action with a cognitive goal to imaginal transformation of objects. Before concluding, I would like very briefly to raise the issue of the place of play activities in the Soviets’ view of the cognitive development of preschoolers. With the great emphasis in the foregoing and in general in Soviet psychology on practical activity, is the play activity of children
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ignored? Not at all; play activity is considered very important in the cognitive development of children-particularly in the transition from purely perceptual actions to practical activity-when the function of objects becomes important as opposed to only their structural characteristics, and in the shift from visual-action thinking to visual-image thinking with its characteristic mental transformations of objects. El’konin (1978) has recently written a book summarizing many years of thinking and research on play in which he proposes a stage development from play with objects to role playing. Up to 3 years the following progression is noted: The earliest form of play is general object manipulation which gradually becomes more specific. Then there is reproduction of separate elements or series of elements of actions that typically are carried out with objects. Next the reproduction of actions of other people occurs as does the use of object substitutes. Renaming of the object substitutes occurs in accordance with their function. Finally, there is the renaming of the child himself and other dolls in a play situation. El’konin focused much of his own research on play on role playing and the use of rules by slightly older preschool children. Role playing and the use of object substitutes of course involves imagined transformations. In one study he asked children to play at changing names to take on the role of a teacher, a friend, or themselves. Children of all preschool ages didn’t like to simply play themselves, some would play the role of a friend, while all preferred to be the teacher. In a second condition they were asked to play an event but to break the normal sequence of elements in an event such as eating in a restaurant. Young children didn’t mind breaking the sequence since they did not have a good idea of how it should be in the first place. Somewhat older children would break the sequence especially if the out-of-sequence activity was an attractive one. Oldest children refused to break the situational appropriate order. A similar pattern was obtained when children were given the task of adopting a role and then behaving in a roleinappropriate fashion. Again, the older children refused to break the proper role-appropriate behavior. Apparently for older children the role playing was the important thing, the cognitive activity had become the goal just as it had in the button-pushing doll movement experiments described previously. It was not the specific practical action which was important. El’konin concludes that with age there is an increasing determination of rules to correspond to the adopted role. Let me summarize. The Soviets have made and are making a serious effort to ask key questions about cognitive development within a very integrated framework-one which stresses activity both overt and mental and one which stresses the influence of the social environment. In addition, it has a very applied or pragmatic cast of how to accelerate behavior. Sometimes, by the standards we use, the integrated framework and the
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interpretation of the results of empirical work on the basis of that framework seem vague. Part of this is due to not having a feel for that framework and I hope the symposium today will help provide that. Whatever the case, we can appreciate the centrality of the specific questions the Soviets are asking and we can appreciate the imaginativeness and cleverness of their techniques for probing the child’s mind. REFERENCES EL’KONIN, D. B. PsiXlrcr/ogi,vc7 i,erj (The psychology of play). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1978. LEONT’EV, A. N. L)e.~trl’nos/. so:ntr~rie. /ic~/~~.\t’ (Activity, consciousness and personality). Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1975. PODDYAKOV, N. N. M~slrlenia doshXol’~7iX~ (The thinking of the preschool child). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1977. SAKULINA, N. P. Sensornoe vospitanie v protsesse izobrazitel’noi deyatel’nosti (Sensory training in the process of drawing activity). In A. P. Usova and N. P. Sakulina (Eds.), 7’eori.vcr i prtrkrikcr S~~IISO~~IO~O ~~o.cpitrrni~~r I’ det.s!,o/rt strdr/ (Theory and practice of sensory training in kindergarten). Moscow: Proshchenie, 1965. VENGER, L. A. Genezis semornjkh .spocohno~s~ei (The genesis of sensory abilities). Moscow: Itzdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1976. ohrtr;cr (Formation of the ZINCHENKO, V. P., & VERGILES, N. Yti. Formiro~~c~nic :rifr/‘nogo visual image). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1969.
EDUCATIONAL
PSYCHOLOGY
5,
140- 149 (19801
Perceptual and Cognitive Development Preschoolers in Soviet Psychology
of
HERBERT L. PICK, JR. Unilwsity
of Minrwsotri
It is very fitting that we are meeting here today to discuss Soviet educational psychology because it provides an opportunity to acknowledge the work of Alexei Nikolaevich Leont’ev who died January 22 of this year. Although Leont’ev was not primarily an educational psychologist, his ideas were a dominant force in all aspects of Soviet psychology in recent years. His own writing ranged from general experimental psychology (especially perception) to applied psychology to developmental psychology. In recent years he elaborated a very influential theory of activity (Leont’ev, 1975). I don’t want to discuss in detail Leont’ev’s theory of activity, but it is important to note that the epistemological emphasis on activity of Marx and Engels was applied by Vygotsky and later by Leont’ev to cognition and cognitive development. This application was combined with a further stressing of the importance of cultural and social influences on these aspects of development-also consistent with Marx. Although in the early history of postrevolution Soviet psychology there was a strong behaviorist tradition, which was given further impetus by the great prestige of Pavlov and his work on conditioned reflexes, the Vygotsky-Leont’ev theory of activity was never behavioristic. It always included mental activities and operations as well as mental elements: images, ideas, and representations, much as does Piaget’s approach. One aspect of the background of the theory of activity concerning the current perceptual and cognitive work which I do want to discuss is a trend that was manifest in the late fifties and early sixties and was even reflected in Leont’ev’s address as president of the 1966 International Congress of Psychology in Moscow. This was a motor-copy theory of perception in some respects similar to the acquired distinctiveness and acquired The preparation of this paper was supported by a Program Project Grant HD 050207 from the National Institutes of Health to the Institute of Child Development of the University of Minnesota and by the Center for Research in Human Learning of the University of Minnesota. The work of the Center is supported by Research Grants from the National Science Foundation and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Familiarity with the material in this paper was largely gained while the author held a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship at Moscow State University during the spring of 1978 under the auspices of the Council of International Exchange of Scholars. 140 0361-476X/80/020140-10$02.00/0 Copyright 0 1980 by Academic Press, Inc. AU rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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equivalence concepts of American learning theory of the time. Like those concepts, the Soviet theory proposed that any given percept was based on a combination of the initial stimulation impinging on the receptors and the self-produced stimulation resulting from the reaction of the organism to that stimulation. Perception was mediated. Unlike the American concept of mediation, the Soviets suggested that the self-reaction of the organism must in some sense copy the form of the external stimulus. This idea resulted in quite a body of research concerned with eye and hand movements of children as they engaged in perceptual tasks. The hypothesis was that these movements would match the shape of the objects being perceived, particularly as the perception became more veridical. On the basis of Western eye movement literature, there was little reason to expect this to happen (and indeed one sometimes suspects that the Soviets pursued this line so avidly because of the political pressures of the time). Generally, the Soviets didn’t find their hypothesized results either. They did find that children as a function of age progressed from exploring chaotically to exploring systematically albeit more and more briefly in various perceptual tasks. This work was done by Zaporozhets and his colleagues, especially V. P. Zinchenko and Ruzskaya. Zinchenko himself collected some rather convincing data with adults that perception even of novel objects can be quite adequate without copying movements. Zinchenko and Vergiles (1969) presented Chinese characters in a perceptual task to subjects under conditions of stabilized retinal images. Here eye movements when they occurred would not result in copying feedback. Nevertheless, subjects were able to perform the tasks. It is to the Soviet psychologists’ credit that they left this blind alley. However, some of their results which concerned how people engaged in perceptual tasks were interesting and the activity component has been preserved without the copying component. Much of the basic research on preschool children’s perceptual and cognitive development is carried out at the Institute of Preschool Education in Moscow under the direction of A. V. Zaporozhets. The work that I will be discussing today is primarily that of L. A. Venger, N. N. Poddyakov, and D. B. El’konin. Venger has been most concerned with perceptual development, and his recent research will be discussed first. Poddyakov is primarily interested in the cognitive development of preschool children and, for purposes of this paper, his approach follows nicely that of Venger. It begins by emphasizing the role of practical action in children’s thinking. El’konin has recently completed a book on children’s play in which he draws a number of implications for cognitive development. These will be discussed briefly. Venger was one of the researchers involved with the motor-copy theory of perception and perceptual development, and his approach still em-
142
HERBERT
L.
PICK,
JR.
phasizes the role of activity in perceptual development. One of his major emphases is on the exploratory acts which are involved in the initial perception of any object or event and how these lead to adequate perception. In this regard a scheme developed by N. P. Sakulina (1965) in the study of children’s artistic performance captures much of Venger’s flavor. This scheme was actually developed to train preschoolers in perceptual analysis so that they would generate adequate images of objects that they were viewing. The first step is to examine the overall shape of the object. This is followed by distinguishing the basic parts of the object and defining their character (form, size, etc.). The third step is defining the interrelations of these parts to each other (especially spatial relations). The fourth step is isolating the minor parts and establishing their spatial relations to the major parts. Finally, a reexamination of the whole object is required. The educational goal is to train children to apply this scheme in the given order so that they don’t forget any of the steps and because the logic of the scheme requires that. This kind of scheme is based on many years of analysis of perceptual activities and from such study Venger has moved to an analysis of the genesis of sensory abilities (Venger, 1976). Venger views these sensory abilities or capacities, as he prefers to call them, as the origin of real talent or giftedness in areas which seem to rely heavily on perceptual ability-fields such as art and music. He regards these capacities as perceptual components of the more complex general activity. With an optimism and a pragmatic orientation which is typical for Soviet psychology, the hope is to trace the development of these capacities, understand their underlying mechanism, and to develop instructional techniques which will increase all children’s achievement in the target areas. In analyzing these areas, Venger focused on sensory capacities which seemed to be central. Thus, for artistic activity, such problems as the perception of projective size and form were investigated and for music, the perception of rhythm. I will illustrate the approach by describing the type of investigation carried out to see to what extent children are able to perceive the projective size of objects. It seems obvious that artistic representation requires the perception and reproduction of projective size. In addition, Venger finds support for this assertion in the literature. However, there has been very little research done on the problem. Indeed, the focus of research has been on the opposite; that is, on the problem of constancy. Constancy according to the classical view involves correction of the projective image on the retina to take into account the point of view and distance of the observer. How would perception be without this correction and would it be possible to get children of preschool age to so perceive? This is Venger’s theoretical problem. His practical problem is how to ascertain whether children understand, when questioned, the difference between real size and projec-
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tive size. In order to report that they see a difference in projective size, they must know what this means; but, in order to understand what such a difference means, they have to be able to see such a difference. Basically, what Venger did was to train children to align the tops and bottoms of the projections of figures at different distances in the field of view, thus equating their visual angle. He also had subjects adjust the distance of an object so that its image just filled a frame and in that respect matched another identically shaped object of different size and distance. In short, the children used a frame to match the projective sizes. After such practice, they were able to make fairly good projective matches by eye. Before such preliminary practice and instruction, the children were strongly influenced by the real size. That is, they exhibited considerable constancy. Their projective size judgments were not as good as those obtained under reduced conditions; that is, under conditions when there were no cues for distance available and the only way the children could make matches of two objects was on the basis of projective size. In order to achieve almost that level of performance, it was necessary to do a training experiment in which children were asked to make a match and then a frame was introduced so that they could see how close the standard and comparison figures were to occupying the same amount of the frame. Other training strategies were also tried with approximately the same results. (This strategy, by the way, is quite typical of Soviet developmental research-a normative experiment first to see what children’s behavior is ordinarily like, then a training experiment to see if the function can be improved. It is typical that in the interpretation of the training experiment the Soviets see the effect of the social-cultural environment on the child’s perception and thinking. It is this effect of society which determines what aspects of a situation are attended to and how the child goes about acquiring information necessary to solve a task.) It is not obvious how much the training procedure in this experiment has modified the perception of the child in the sense of whether they are able to see the projective size of objects as opposed to whether they have simply learned a technique for achieving a “correct” match. This issue depends a bit on how one defines perception and where one draws the line between perception and cognition. The Soviets in general tend to draw that line further in the direction of cognition than we do. The line actually becomes quite blurred as we next consider the work of Poddyakov on the cognitive development of preschool children. Poddyakov (1977) focuses on two forms of early thinking: visual-action thinking and visual-image thinking. He sees these as precursors of later conceptual thinking. They are by definition very closely tied to perceptual processes. Visual-action thinking refers to problem solving by actual manipulation of objects in order to gain more information about the situa-
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tion often in the act of resolving the problem. Thus, the hallmark of visual-action thinking is practical action. In contrast, visual-image thinking is something like Arnheim’s visual thinking. It also involves transformations on objects, but these are mental operations and have the advantage of freedom from physical constraints of real situations. Conceptually, it is important to note that while there is a developmental progression from visual-action to visual-image thinking to conceptual thinking, in fact all forms are present in adults where they are useful and maybe even necessary. VISUAL-ACTION
THINKING
Since visual-action thinking is so closely tied to practical action, it is necessary to discuss what is meant by practical action. All external material acts which produce a transformation of the situation are considered practical actions. These are distinguished from, for example, communicative acts by hand or voice which don’t directly transform the situation. Practical actions are further subdivided into those that are undertaken directly to have a practical effect; i.e., are executive or instrumental, and those that are undertaken to gain information; i.e., are cognitive actions. That information itself might or might not be relevant to a practical task. An experimental illustration of this conceptualization involved an apparatus in which a doll could be moved around a board by remote control. The doll’s motion was controlled by four buttons on a little console. Each button moved the doll in one of four directions: back, forth, right, or left. The children’s task was to move the doll along a path to a goal box. Initially children were not given any special instruction about how the apparatus worked other than being shown that the buttons were to be used to move the doll around. Children between 3 and 7 years tried the task. The youngest simply played with the buttons and moving the doll but didn’t relate their activity at all to the task. Their behavior was not studied further. The 4 to 5 year olds realized right away that they had to solve a subtask of finding the correct button to push. They did this by actually moving the doll considerable distances, showing rather long durations of presses and rather variable time between button presses. When the 4 to 5 year olds pressed an incorrect button, they tended to become interested in the movement of the doll itself and not notice it was going in the wrong direction until it had moved a considerable distance. The 5 to 6 year olds started off pressing with durations (rather long) of 1 to 2 set; but, in contrast to the 4 to 5 year olds, the duration of presses was quickly reduced to 0.4 to 0.8 sec. Also, they didn’t express any negative reaction when the doll moved in an incorrect direction. Their probing presses had a cognitive aim rather than executive. With the 4 to 5 year olds the stage of the probe trials was reached only slowly. Even when the duration of their
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presses had become quite short, their negative emotional reactions to an incorrect direction of movement suggested that the presses, while practical actions, were still executive rather than cognitive. A final feature distinguishing cognitive type probe trials from the executive type is the fact that the decision as to whether the direction of movement was correct or not was made after the trial ended in the case of the probe trial and during the movement in the case of the executive trials. Besides illustrating different types of practical activity, this example also illustrates nicely a type of qualitative analysis of behavior which is characteristic of the Soviets’ interpretation of their data. Continuing the investigation of visual-action thinking, the same apparatus was used to study the formation of a generalized means of problem solving in such situations. The question was whether children would learn to undertake practical actions in problem solving which are purely cognitive in nature unrelated to any specific goal such as moving a doll along a particular path. In the previous experiment, children didn’t know which button controlled which motion and they had to determine this by trial and error. In a subsequent experiment, the movement controlled by each button was coded by a pointer on the board so the child could anticipate which button to try next. They readily learned this specific set of associations, but its functioning was still at a low level in the sense that if the functional significance of buttons was changed, they resorted to trial and error behavior. In order to achieve generalization in their use of coding strategies, it was necessary to start with actions which were executive, then to gradually fade out their initial executive significance leaving only their cognitive significance. To do this, 4 to 5 year old children were taught to place a coding indicator by each button. To start with, the experimenter had placed the indicators in position and after the children had used them they were removed and the children were asked to replace them. When they didn’t know how to do this, they were taught to press a button to see the direction of movement, then place the indicator by the button. (How the indicator itself should be oriented-it was pointer shaped-posed a bit of a problem. To get this correct, children learned to use a mediation technique moving their hand in the particular direction of the doll movement, then placing the point of the indicator in that direction, a form of motor mediation.) Now the children had a generalized means of coding the significance of the buttons and any particular problem of the same type; i.e., when the indicators were removed and the function of the buttons rearranged. They had to be especially instructed to do so and then could accomplish it. Older children (5 to 6 years) once taught to place their own indicators spontaneously used the technique in new problems und in fact were almost bored by the practical executive problem-the cognitive activity of coding the buttons had become an end
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in itself. This, in a sense, represents a pure form of visual-action thinking, thinking based on action but not tied to a specific practical goal. VISUAL-IMAGE
THINKING
The next stage in development is visual-image thinking. Zinchenko describes it as “that form of human activity, a product of which is the generation of new images, the creation of new visual forms carrying weight and having visual significance. These images are distinguished from objects of perception by their automaticity and freedom” (Zinchenko, 1973). Poddyakov tirst focused on the transition from visualaction thinking to visual-imagining thinking. Here again his approach appears to involve starting with direct sensory support for a series of actions and then fading this support out. An illustrative experimental task involved rolling a ball through a maze-like path in a box. In order to guide the ball, the box had to be tilted in various directions by means of handles on each side. Children were asked to perform this task under several conditions. One condition simply had the box covered with clear glass so that child could see the ball, path, and results of his actions. A second had the box covered with cardboard, with an outline of the maze on the cardboard so the child could see the path, but not the ball nor the results of its actions. A final condition again had the clear glass cover but the child’s task was only to tell the experimenters how to tilt the box, not to actually carry out the procedure. (The experimenter didn’t actually carry out the instructions either.) Here the child could see the ball and path but had to imagine the results of a series of acts. Performance was fine in the first condition but deteriorated in the other two, being worst in the third-verbal report-condition. The difficulty with the second condition was poor orienting toward the essential features of the task. The children started off all right but apparently couldn’t keep updating what was happening in the box. This was helped some by children using motor mediation in the form of gestures to remind themselves of the path of maze or the position of the ball in the maze. A training experiment involved an adult tilting the box and the child moving a marker along a copy of the maze to indicate the progress of the ball along the path. This procedure didn’t work using the path drawn on the top of the box as the copy. Apparently the separation of the copy of the maze path from the box emphasized for the children the difference between the modeled and the real object. The internalization of thinking has had a very important place in theoretical discussions in Soviet developmental psychology. This, of course, is closely related to their emphasis on activity. Indeed thinking is almost conceived of as the internalization of practical actions. P. Y. Gal’perin, the leading Soviet educational psychologist, has been a strong
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proponent of this view, developing an algorithm for teaching children mental acts. In his conception, such thinking as that, for example, which is involved in arithmetic consists of mentally performing the kinds of computing operations which are initially done with sets of objects. His algorithm consists of a series of steps starting with general orientation to the task, then performing the task by means of overt acts with material supports. Then these acts are overtly and completely verbalized in the performance of the task without the material supports. Finally, the verbalization is gradually abbreviated and internalized. Poddyakov’s approach differs from that of Gal’perin mainly in not following or thinking necessary the great stress on verbalization. While he acknowledges that verbalization is important and often helps in thinking, it is not essential in the visual forms of thinking he is dealing with. A final example from Poddyakov comes close to the end state of the shift to visual-image thinking. It involves the mental representation of changes in spatial position of occluded parts of objects on the basis of parts still visible. Children were asked to imagine the rotation of objects which were partially occluded by a disk. They were shown an object: a small straight stick or realistic stick-like figure, an L or an L-shaped realistic figure, e.g., in the shape of a bird. Then, the figure was covered by a disk so that only one part was visible, e.g., the bird’s head. Children were asked to point to the position of the other end. All could do this with straight figures without any particular trouble. However, when the object was rotated 180” under the disk, only half of the 4 to 5 year olds correctly located the other end of the object, with 70% of the 5 to 6 year olds, and all of the 6 to 7 year olds doing this. Those who did locate the opposite end correctly could also do so under 90” and 270” rotation but under rotation to oblique angles such as 45” or 225” even the 6 to 7 year olds had considerable difficulty. The L-shaped figures were, as might be expected, significantly more difficult than the straight figures and possibly surprisingly the naturalistic figures were easier than the more abstract line figures. Observation of the children indicated that before answering they often moved their hands or ran their eyes along the hidden areas of the figures. This is again motor mediation somewhat reminiscent of the motor-copy theory. In this case, no particular training experiment was done but children’s performance did simply improve with practice. Thus, we have traced, by example, one type of children’s thinking from practical executive actions to practical action with a cognitive goal to imaginal transformation of objects. Before concluding, I would like very briefly to raise the issue of the place of play activities in the Soviets’ view of the cognitive development of preschoolers. With the great emphasis in the foregoing and in general in Soviet psychology on practical activity, is the play activity of children
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ignored? Not at all; play activity is considered very important in the cognitive development of children-particularly in the transition from purely perceptual actions to practical activity-when the function of objects becomes important as opposed to only their structural characteristics, and in the shift from visual-action thinking to visual-image thinking with its characteristic mental transformations of objects. El’konin (1978) has recently written a book summarizing many years of thinking and research on play in which he proposes a stage development from play with objects to role playing. Up to 3 years the following progression is noted: The earliest form of play is general object manipulation which gradually becomes more specific. Then there is reproduction of separate elements or series of elements of actions that typically are carried out with objects. Next the reproduction of actions of other people occurs as does the use of object substitutes. Renaming of the object substitutes occurs in accordance with their function. Finally, there is the renaming of the child himself and other dolls in a play situation. El’konin focused much of his own research on play on role playing and the use of rules by slightly older preschool children. Role playing and the use of object substitutes of course involves imagined transformations. In one study he asked children to play at changing names to take on the role of a teacher, a friend, or themselves. Children of all preschool ages didn’t like to simply play themselves, some would play the role of a friend, while all preferred to be the teacher. In a second condition they were asked to play an event but to break the normal sequence of elements in an event such as eating in a restaurant. Young children didn’t mind breaking the sequence since they did not have a good idea of how it should be in the first place. Somewhat older children would break the sequence especially if the out-of-sequence activity was an attractive one. Oldest children refused to break the situational appropriate order. A similar pattern was obtained when children were given the task of adopting a role and then behaving in a roleinappropriate fashion. Again, the older children refused to break the proper role-appropriate behavior. Apparently for older children the role playing was the important thing, the cognitive activity had become the goal just as it had in the button-pushing doll movement experiments described previously. It was not the specific practical action which was important. El’konin concludes that with age there is an increasing determination of rules to correspond to the adopted role. Let me summarize. The Soviets have made and are making a serious effort to ask key questions about cognitive development within a very integrated framework-one which stresses activity both overt and mental and one which stresses the influence of the social environment. In addition, it has a very applied or pragmatic cast of how to accelerate behavior. Sometimes, by the standards we use, the integrated framework and the
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interpretation of the results of empirical work on the basis of that framework seem vague. Part of this is due to not having a feel for that framework and I hope the symposium today will help provide that. Whatever the case, we can appreciate the centrality of the specific questions the Soviets are asking and we can appreciate the imaginativeness and cleverness of their techniques for probing the child’s mind. REFERENCES EL’KONIN, D. B. PsiXlrcr/ogi,vc7 i,erj (The psychology of play). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1978. LEONT’EV, A. N. L)e.~trl’nos/. so:ntr~rie. /ic~/~~.\t’ (Activity, consciousness and personality). Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1975. PODDYAKOV, N. N. M~slrlenia doshXol’~7iX~ (The thinking of the preschool child). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1977. SAKULINA, N. P. Sensornoe vospitanie v protsesse izobrazitel’noi deyatel’nosti (Sensory training in the process of drawing activity). In A. P. Usova and N. P. Sakulina (Eds.), 7’eori.vcr i prtrkrikcr S~~IISO~~IO~O ~~o.cpitrrni~~r I’ det.s!,o/rt strdr/ (Theory and practice of sensory training in kindergarten). Moscow: Proshchenie, 1965. VENGER, L. A. Genezis semornjkh .spocohno~s~ei (The genesis of sensory abilities). Moscow: Itzdatel’stvo “Pedagogika,” 1976. ohrtr;cr (Formation of the ZINCHENKO, V. P., & VERGILES, N. Yti. Formiro~~c~nic :rifr/‘nogo visual image). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1969.