Course work: Imagination as a mental cognitive process. Theoretical foundations of imagination development
Imagination as a mental cognitive process
DEVELOPMENT OF IMAGINATION IN PRESCHOOL AGE
Memory development tools
In the first year, the child’s involuntary memorization proceeds in joint activities with an adult through manipulation with objects.
o ensuring repeated repetition of an action in order to memorize it with a word designation;
o finger games;
o inclusion of folklore in communication with the child;
o in middle and high school school age reliance on a picture that reflects the main content of the text. In this way, verbal memory develops in unity with figurative and motor memory.
o observations, because memory depends on the completeness of perception and active analysis of the object is necessary;
o daily routine;
o eliminating unnecessary emotional overload;
o the development of voluntary memory occurs when an adult encourages a child to consciously reproduce his experience in play and productive activity;
o semantic correlation - establishing associations between the word and the object depicted in the picture (support for memorization);
o the adult’s demand to remember must be caused by the needs of the activity in which the child is involved;
o teaching a 5-6 year old child logical memorization techniques;
o didactic games.
1. Imagination as a mental cognitive process
2. The emergence and development of imagination
3. general characteristics children's imagination
4. Means of developing imagination
Imagination– this is a mental cognitive process of creating new images by processing and recombining existing experience; reflection of reality in new, unexpected combinations and connections.
Imagination is inherent only to man.
Types of imagination:
1. Depending on the degree of activity
Active
Passive
2. Depending on the originality and independence of the images
Creative
Recreating
3. From having a consciously set goal to create an image
Deliberate
Unintentional
This is a socially determined process that depends on the adult and on communication with him. In infancy and early age, there is an accumulation of sensory, life experiences, impressions, which will then become material for creating images of the imagination.
O.M.Dchenko highlights three main stages of imagination development
| Stage 1 2.5-3 years – period of substantive activity | By mastering actions with objects, the child masters object substitutions. Based on his experience, he can complete vague images (for example, a square in a house, a booth, etc.). The image of the imagination appears in the process of drawing. The child cannot say in advance what he will draw. |
| 2nd stage 4-5 years – period role playing game, drawing, designing | Imaginary objects are supplemented with various details: - the ability to plan the upcoming action develops: “I will draw a house”; - then this house is supplemented with details (pipe, windows, flowers, etc.); - along with combining memory representations, the child modifies objects: “I will build a tower to heaven”; - speech development leads the child to verbal creativity, composing fairy tales and poems. |
| Stage 3 6-7 years – development of volition | A child can deviate from the learned standards and combine them in different ways. A holistic image of the imagination can be built in a variety of ways, often on the basis of holistic planning. The implementation of the plan is going according to plan. |
In the 2nd year of life, the main means of stimulating the imagination is 1) involving the child in imaginary situations, fun, practical jokes (rolled on the knees, “dropped” - “Into the hole - bang!”);
2) the use of folklore, toys (the bunny sits and watches the children eat);
3) learning to use substitute objects, constructing an imaginary situation (in the 3rd year);
4) playing around with buildings;
5) creation of a subject-development environment, which includes, along with familiar objects, non-specific objects (junk and natural material);
6) enriching the child’s own experience;
7) training in ways and means of transforming impressions; formation of critical thinking (does this happen or not?; identification of contradictions);
8) creation of problem situations that do not have a clear solution.
Imagination: definition, types, mechanisms. Individual characteristics and the development of imagination.
Imagination is the mental process of creating an image of an object or situation by restructuring existing ideas. Images of the imagination do not always correspond to reality; they contain elements of fantasy and fiction. If the imagination draws pictures to the consciousness that nothing or little corresponds in reality, then it is called fantasy. If the imagination is directed to the future, it is called a dream. The process of imagination always occurs in inextricable connection with two other mental processes - memory and thinking.
Types of imagination:
Active imagination - using it, a person, by force of will, at his own request evokes appropriate images in himself.
Passive imagination - its images arise spontaneously, regardless of the will and desire of a person.
Productive imagination - in it, reality is consciously constructed by a person, and not simply mechanically copied or recreated. But at the same time, she is still creatively transformed in the image.
Reproductive imagination - the task is to reproduce reality as it is, and although there is also an element of fantasy here, such imagination is more reminiscent of perception or memory than creativity.
Functions of the imagination:
Figurative representation of reality;
Regulation of emotional states;
Voluntary regulation of cognitive processes and human states;
Formation of an internal action plan.
Ways to create images of the imagination:
Agglutination is the creation of images by combining any qualities, properties, parts.
Emphasis - highlighting any part, detail of the whole.
Typing is the most difficult technique. The artist depicts a specific episode that absorbs a lot of similar ones and thus is, as it were, their representative. A literary image is also formed, in which the typical features of many people of a given circle, a certain era are concentrated.
Imagination processes, like memory processes, can vary in the degree of voluntariness or intentionality. An extreme case of involuntary imagination is dreams, in which images are born unintentionally and in the most unexpected and bizarre combinations. The activity of the imagination, which unfolds in a half-asleep, drowsy state, for example, before falling asleep, is also involuntary at its core.
Among the various types and forms of voluntary imagination, one can distinguish reconstructive imagination, creative imagination and dream.
Recreating imagination manifests itself when a person needs to recreate a representation of an object that matches its description as fully as possible.
Creative imagination characterized by the fact that a person transforms ideas and creates new ones not according to an existing model, but independently outlining the contours created image and choosing the necessary materials for it.
A special form of imagination is a dream - the independent creation of new images. Main feature dreams is that it is aimed at future activities, i.e. A dream is an imagination aimed at a desired future.
The leading mechanism of imagination is the transfer of some property of an object. The heuristic nature of transfer is measured by the extent to which it contributes to the disclosure of the specific integral nature of another object in the process of its cognition or creation by a person.
People's imagination is developed differently, and it manifests itself differently in their activities and public life. Individual characteristics of imagination are expressed in the fact that people differ in the degree of development of imagination and in the type of images with which they operate most often.
The degree of development of imagination is characterized by the vividness of images and the depth with which the data of past experience is processed, as well as the novelty and meaningfulness of the results of this processing. The strength and vividness of imagination is easily assessed when the product of imagination is implausible and bizarre images, for example, among the authors of fairy tales. Poor development of imagination is expressed in a low level of processing of ideas. Weak imagination entails difficulties in solving mental problems that require the ability to visualize a specific situation. With an insufficient level of imagination development, a rich and emotionally diverse life is impossible.
People differ most clearly in the degree of vividness of their imagination. If we assume that there is a corresponding scale, then at one pole there will be people with extremely high levels of vividness of the images of the imagination, which they experience as visions, and at the other pole there will be people with extremely pale ideas. As a rule, we find a high level of development of imagination among people engaged in creative work - writers, artists, musicians, scientists.
Significant differences between people are revealed regarding the nature of the dominant type of imagination. Most often there are people with a predominance of visual, auditory or motor images of the imagination. But there are people who have a high development of all or most types of imagination. These people can be classified as the so-called mixed type. Belonging to one or another type of imagination very significantly affects the individual psychological characteristics of a person. For example, people of the auditory or motor type very often dramatize the situation in their thoughts, imagining a non-existent opponent.
The development of imagination occurs during human ontogenesis and requires the accumulation of a certain stock of ideas, which can later serve as material for creating images of the imagination. Imagination develops in close connection with the development of the entire personality, in the process of training and education, as well as in unity with thinking, memory, will and feelings. Despite the difficulty of determining the stages of development of imagination in humans, certain patterns in its formation can be identified. Thus, the first manifestations of imagination are closely related to the process of perception. For example, children aged one and a half years are not yet able to listen to even the simplest stories or fairy tales; they are constantly distracted or fall asleep, but listen with pleasure to stories about what they themselves have experienced. This phenomenon clearly shows the connection between imagination and perception. A child listens to a story about his experiences because he clearly imagines what is being said. The connection between perception and imagination continues at the next stage of development, when the child begins to process received impressions in his games, modifying previously perceived objects in his imagination. The chair turns into a cave or an airplane, the box into a car. However, it should be noted that the first images of a child’s imagination are always associated with activity. The child does not dream, but embodies the processed image in his activities, even though this activity is a game.
An important stage in the development of imagination is associated with the age when a child masters speech. Speech allows the child to include in the imagination not only specific images, but also more abstract ideas and concepts. Moreover, speech allows the child to move from expressing images of imagination in activity to their direct expression in speech. The stage of speech acquisition is accompanied by an increase practical experience and the development of attention, which allows the child to more easily identify individual parts of an object, which he perceives as independent and with which he increasingly operates in his imagination. However, the synthesis occurs with significant distortions of reality. Due to the lack of sufficient experience and insufficient critical thinking, the child cannot create an image that is close to reality. The main feature of this stage is the involuntary nature of the emergence of imagination. Most often, images of imagination are formed in a child of this age involuntarily, in accordance with the situation in which he finds himself. Next stage the development of imagination is associated with the emergence of its active forms. At this stage, the process of imagination becomes voluntary. The emergence of active forms of imagination is initially associated with stimulating initiative on the part of an adult. For example, when an adult asks a child to do something (draw a tree, build a house out of cubes, etc.), he activates the imagination process. In order to fulfill the request of an adult, the child must first create, or recreate, a certain image in his imagination. Moreover, this process of imagination, by its nature, is already voluntary, since the child tries to control it. Later, the child begins to use his own imagination without any adult participation. This leap in the development of imagination is reflected primarily in the nature of the child’s games. They become focused and story-driven. The things surrounding the child become not just stimuli for the development of objective activity, but act as material for the embodiment of images of his imagination. A child at the age of four or five begins to draw, build, sculpt, rearrange things and combine them in accordance with his plan.
Another major shift in imagination occurs during school age. The need for understanding educational material causes the activation of the process of recreating imagination. In order to assimilate the knowledge that is given at school, the child actively uses his imagination, which causes the progressive development of the ability to process images of perception into images of imagination.
Another reason for the rapid development of imagination during school years is that during the learning process the child actively receives new and diverse ideas about objects and phenomena. real world. These ideas serve as a necessary basis for imagination and stimulate the student’s creative activity.
1. Theoretical part
1.1 Brief description of imagination
1.2 Imagination, its essence, forms of expression of imagination, forms of synthesis of ideas in the process of imagination
1.3 Types of imagination
1.4 Development of imagination, conditions for the development of imagination
1.5 Imagination, expression, bodily dialogue
2. Practical part
2.1 Who has a richer imagination: an adult or a child
2.2 Test to identify the child’s development level
2.3 Solving imagination problems
2.4 Tests for studying the development of imagination
1. Theoretical part
1.1 Brief description of imagination
Imagination– the mental process of creating an image of an object or situation by restructuring existing ideas. Imagination has its source objective reality. And in turn, the products of imagination find objective material expression. It is connected with the characteristics of the individual, her interests, knowledge and skills.
The physiological basis of imagination is the formation of new combinations from temporary connections that have already been formed in past experience.
Functions of the imagination
Representing activities in images and creating the opportunity to use them when solving problems;
Regulation of emotional relationships;
Voluntary regulation of cognitive processes and human states;
Formation of a person’s internal plan;
Planning and programming of human activities.
Forms of expression of imagination
1. Construction of the image, means and final result of the activity.
2. Creation of a behavior program in an uncertain situation.
3. Creation of images corresponding to the description of the object, etc.
Forms of synthesis of representations in imagination processes
Agglutination is the combination of qualities, properties, parts of objects that are not connected in reality;
Hyperbolization or emphasis - increasing or decreasing an object, changing the quality of its parts;
Sharpening – emphasizing any features of objects;
Schematization – smoothing out differences between objects and identifying similarities between them;
Typification is the selection of the essential, repeating in homogeneous phenomena and its embodiment in a specific image.
Types of imagination
1. Active imagination is controlled by the efforts of the will. Images passive imaginations arise spontaneously, apart from the desire of a person.
2. Recreating Imagination– a presentation of something new for a given person, based on a verbal description or conventional image of this new thing. Creative- imagination, giving new, original, first-time images. The source of creativity is the social need for a particular new product. It determines the emergence of a creative idea, creative idea, which leads to the emergence of something new.
3. Fantasy- a type of imagination that produces images that do not correspond to reality. However, fantasy images are never completely divorced from reality. It has been noticed that if any product of fantasy is decomposed into its constituent elements, then among them it will be difficult to find something that does not really exist. Dreams- a fantasy associated with a desire, most often a somewhat idealized future. Dream It differs from a dream in that it is more realistic and more connected with reality. Dreams- passive and involuntary forms of imagination, in which many vital human needs are expressed. Hallucinations– fantastic visions, usually the result of mental disorders or painful conditions.
1.2 Imagination, its essence, forms of expression of imagination, forms of synthesis of ideas in the process of imagination
Everyone probably knows what imagination is. We very often say to each other: “Imagine such a situation...”, “Imagine that you...” or “Well, come up with something!” So, in order to do all this - “imagine”, “imagine”, “invent” - we need imagination. This laconic definition of the concept of “imagination” needs to be added only a few strokes.
A person can imagine something that he has never perceived before, that he has never encountered in his life, or something that will be created in a more or less distant future. Such representations are called representations of the imagination or simple imagination.
Imagination- informative higher process, a psychological activity consisting in the creation of ideas and mental situations that are never generally perceived by a person in reality.
The imagination reflects the external world in a unique and unique way; it allows you to program not only future behavior, but also imagine the possible conditions in which this behavior will be carried out.
Imagination is not the ability to fantasize without a goal, but an intuitive ability to see the essence of parameters - their natural logic. It combines images of what does not yet exist from materials of memory and feelings, creates an image of the unknown as known, that is, creates its objective content and meaning, considers them valid. Therefore, imagination is the self-movement of sensory and semantic reflections, and mechanism imagination unites them into integrity, synthesizes feelings into thought, as a result of which a new image or judgment is created about the unknown as about the known. And all this does not happen materially - in the mental plane, when a person acts without practically working.
A person’s imagination is his ability to look ahead and consider new item in his future state.
Therefore, the past at every moment of a person’s life must exist in accordance with one or another purposefulness towards the future. If memory claims to be active and effective, and not just a repository of experience, it must always be aimed at the future, at the form of the future self, one’s abilities and what a person strives to achieve. Such imagination always works: a person transforms objects and raw materials not just in the imagination, but actually with the help of imagination, paving the way to the desired object. Of great importance in activating the work of the imagination is astonishment.Surprise in turn is caused by:
¨ novelty of the perceived “something”;
¨ awareness of it as something unknown and interesting;
¨ an impulse that sets in advance the quality of imagination and thinking, attracts attention, captures the feelings and the whole person.
Imagination, together with intuition, is capable of not only creating an image of a future object or thing, but also finding its natural measure - a state of perfect harmony - the logic of its structure. It gives rise to the ability to make discoveries, helps to find new ways to develop technology and technology, ways to solve problems and problems that arise before a person.
The initial forms of imagination first appear at the end of early childhood in connection with the emergence of plot-based role-playing games and the development of the sign-symbolic function of consciousness. The child learns to replace real objects and situations with imaginary ones, to build new images from existing ideas. Further development of imagination goes in several directions.
Þ Along the lines of expanding the circle of replaced objects and improving the substitution operation itself, connecting with the development of logical thinking.
Þ Along the lines of improving the operations of the recreating imagination. The child gradually begins to create increasingly complex images and their systems based on existing descriptions, texts, and fairy tales. The content of these images develops and enriches. A personal touch is introduced into the images; they are characterized by brightness, richness, and emotionality.
Þ Creative imagination develops when the child not only understands some techniques of expressiveness, but also independently applies them.
Þ Imagination becomes mediated and intentional. The child begins to create images in accordance with the set goal and certain requirements, according to a predetermined plan, and control the degree of compliance of the result with the task.
Imagination is expressed:
1. In constructing the image of the means and the final result of the subject’s objective activity.
2. In creating a behavior program when the problem situation is uncertain.
3. In the production of images that are not programmed, but replace activity.
4. Creation of images that correspond to the description of the object.
The most important meaning of imagination is that it allows you to imagine the result of work before it begins (for example, a table in its completed form as ready product), thereby orienting a person in the process of activity. Creating, with the help of imagination, a model of the final or intermediate product of labor (those parts that must be sequentially produced in order to assemble a table) contributes to its objective embodiment.
The essence of imagination, if we talk about its mechanisms, is the transformation of ideas, the creation of new images based on existing ones. Imagination is a reflection of reality in new, unusual, unexpected combinations and connections.
There are 4 types of imagination:
Representations of what exists in reality, but which a person has not previously perceived;
Representations of the historical past;
Ideas of what will happen in the future and what never happened in reality.
No matter how new what is created by a person’s imagination, it inevitably comes from what exists in reality and is based on it. Therefore, imagination, like the entire psyche, is a reflection of the surrounding world by the brain, but only a reflection of what a person did not perceive, a reflection of what will become reality in the future.
Physiologically, the process of imagination is the process of formation of new combinations and combinations from already established temporary nerve connections in the cerebral cortex.
The process of imagination always occurs in inextricable connection with two other mental processes - memory and thinking. Just like thinking, imagination arises in a problem situation, that is, in cases where it is necessary to find new solutions; just like thinking, it is motivated by the needs of the individual. The real process of satisfying needs may be preceded by an illusory, imaginary satisfaction of needs, that is, a living, vivid representation of the situation in which these needs can be satisfied. But the anticipatory reflection of reality, carried out in the processes of fantasy, occurs in a concrete form. Imagination works at that stage of cognition when the uncertainty of the situation is very great. The more familiar, precise and definite a situation is, the less scope it gives for imagination. However, in the presence of very approximate information about the situation, on the contrary, it is difficult to obtain an answer with the help of thinking - this is where fantasy comes into play. Speaking of imagination, we only emphasize the predominant direction of mental activity. If a person is faced with the task of reproducing representations of things and events that were previously in his experience, we are talking about memory processes. But if the same ideas are reproduced in order to create a new combination of these ideas or create new ideas from them, we are talking about the activity of the imagination.
The activity of imagination is closely related to a person’s emotional experiences. Imagining what is desired can evoke positive feelings in a person, and in certain situations, a dream about a happy future can bring a person out of extremely negative states, allowing him to escape from the situations of the present moment, analyze what is happening and rethink the significance of the situation for the future. Consequently, imagination plays a very significant role in the regulation of our behavior.
The imagination is also connected with the realization of our volitional actions. So, imagination is present in any vision we see. labor activity, because before we create anything, it is necessary to have ideas about what we are creating.
Imagination, due to the characteristics of the systems responsible for it, is to a certain extent associated with the regulation of organic processes and movement. Imagination influences many organic processes: the functioning of the glands, the activity of internal organs, metabolism, etc. For example: the idea of a delicious dinner causes us to salivate profusely, and by instilling in a person the idea of a burn, one can cause real signs of a “burn” on the skin.
We can conclude that imagination plays a significant role both in the regulation of processes in the human body and in the regulation of his motivated behavior.
The main tendency of imagination is the transformation of ideas (images), which ultimately ensures the creation of a model of a situation that is obviously new and has not previously arisen.
Every new image, new idea is correlated with reality and, in case of discrepancy, is rejected as false or corrected
The synthesis of ideas in the processes of imagination is carried out in various forms:
- agglutination - connection (“gluing”) of various qualities, properties, parts of objects that are not combined in reality, the result can be a very bizarre image, sometimes far from reality, many fairy-tale images are built by agglutination (mermaid, hut on chicken legs, etc.), it used in technical creativity (for example, accordion is a combination of piano and button accordion);
- hyperbolization or accentuation - a paradoxical increase or decrease in an object (Tom Thumb, Gulliver), a change in the number of its parts, any detail or part of the whole is highlighted and becomes dominant, bearing the main load (dragons with seven heads, etc.);
- sharpening – emphasizing any features of objects, with the help of this technique cartoons and evil caricatures are created;
- schematization – smoothing out the differences between objects and identifying similarities between them, for example, the artist’s creation of an ornament, the elements of which are taken from the plant world;
-typing – highlighting the essential, repeating in homogeneous phenomena and its embodiment in a specific image, bordering on the creative process, is widely used in fiction, sculpture, painting.
1.3 Types of imagination
The simplest form of imagination is those images that arise without special intention or effort on our part.
Any exciting, interesting teaching usually evokes a vivid, involuntary imagination. An extreme case of voluntary imagination is dreams, in which images are born unintentionally and in the most unexpected and bizarre combinations. The activity of the imagination, which unfolds in a half-asleep, drowsy state, for example, before falling asleep, is also involuntary at its core.
The voluntary imagination has much more to do with a person higher value. This type of imagination manifests itself when a person is faced with the task of creating certain images, outlined by himself or given to him from the outside. In these cases, the process of imagination is controlled and directed by the person himself. The basis of such work of imagination is the ability to arbitrarily evoke and change the necessary ideas.
Depending on the severity of activity, they differ:
1) passive imagination; 2) active imagination.
According to the degree of independence of imagination and the originality of its products, two types of imagination are distinguished - re-creative and creative.
Recreating Imagination– presentation of objects new to humans in accordance with their description, drawing, diagram. This type of imagination is used in a wide variety of activities. We encounter this type of imagination when we read descriptions of geographical places or historical events, as well as when we get acquainted with literary characters. The study of geographical maps serves as a kind of school for recreating imagination. The habit of wandering around the map and imagining various places in your imagination helps you see them correctly in reality. Spatial imagination, necessary when studying stereometry, develops by carefully examining drawings and natural volumetric bodies from different angles. It should be noted that the reconstructive imagination forms not only visual ideas, but also tactile, auditory, etc.
Most often we are faced with recreating imagination when it is necessary to recreate some idea from a verbal description. However, there are times when we recreate an idea about an object not using words, but on the basis of diagrams and drawings. In this case, the success of recreating an image is largely determined by a person’s abilities for spatial imagination, that is, the ability to recreate an image in three-dimensional space. Consequently, the process of creative imagination is closely related to human thinking and memory.
The next type of imagination is creative. It is characterized by the fact that a person transforms ideas and creates new images (which are realized in original and valuable products of activity) not according to an existing model, but independently outlining the contours of the created image and choosing the necessary materials for it.
In this case, they differ:
objective novelty– if the images and ideas are original and do not repeat anything existing about the experience of other people;
subjective novelty– if they repeat previously created ones, but for a given person they are new and original.
The creative imagination that arises in work remains an integral part of technical, artistic and any other creativity, taking the form of active and purposeful manipulation of visual ideas in search of ways to satisfy needs.
Creative imagination, like recreating, is closely related to memory, since in all cases of its manifestation a person uses his previous experience. Therefore, there is no hard boundary between the creative imagination that recreates.
The source of creative activity is social necessity, the need for one or another new product.
It is wrong to think that creativity is a free play of the imagination that does not require much and sometimes hard work. The so-called inspiration - the optimal concentration of a person’s spiritual powers and abilities - is the result of a lot of previous work.
A special form of imagination is dream. The essence of this type Imagination is the independent creation of new images. At the same time, a dream has a number of significant differences from creative imagination. Firstly, in a dream a person always creates an image of what he wants, while in creative images the desires of their creator are not always embodied. In dreams, what attracts a person and what he strives for finds its figurative expression. Secondly, a dream is a process of imagination that is not included in creative activity, that is, it does not immediately and directly produce an objective product in the form of a work of art, a scientific discovery, a technical invention, etc.
The main feature of a dream is that it is aimed at future activities, that is, a dream is an imagination aimed at the desired future. Moreover, several subtypes of this type of imagination should be distinguished.
Most often, a person makes plans for the future and in his dreams determines the ways to achieve his plans. In this case, the dream is an active, voluntary, conscious process.
But there are people for whom the dream acts as a substitute for activity. One of the reasons for this phenomenon, as a rule, lies in the failures in life that they constantly suffer. As a result of a series of failures, a person abandons the fulfillment of his plans and plunges into a dream. In this case, the dream acts as a conscious, voluntary process that has no practical completion.
There are situations when a dream acts as a unique form of psychological protection, providing temporary escape from problems that have arisen, which contributes to a certain neutralization of a negative mental state and ensuring the safety of regulatory mechanisms while reducing the overall activity of a person.
Imagination is passive– characterized by the creation of images that are not brought to life; programs that are not implemented or cannot be implemented at all. In this case, imagination acts as a substitute for activity, its surrogate, because of which a person refuses the need to act.
It could be:
1) deliberate– creates images (dreams) unrelated to the will, which could contribute to their implementation; the predominance of dreams in the processes of imagination indicates certain defects in personality development. All people tend to dream about something joyful, pleasant, and tempting. In dreams, the connection between fantasy products and needs is easily revealed. But if dreams predominate in a person’s imaginative processes, then this is a defect in the development of personality, it indicates its passivity. If a person is passive, if he does not fight for a better future, and his present life is difficult and joyless, then he often creates for himself an illusory, fictitious life, where his needs are fully satisfied, where he succeeds in everything, where he occupies a position that he cannot hope for in the present. time and at real life;
2) unintentional– observed when the activity of consciousness, the second signaling system, is weakened, during temporary inactivity of a person, during his pathological disorders, half asleep, in a dream, in a state of passion.
Types of imagination can be represented in a diagram
1.4 Development of imagination, conditions for the development of imagination
A person is not born with a developed imagination. The development of imagination occurs during human ontogenesis and requires the accumulation of a certain stock of ideas, which in the future can serve as material for creating images of the imagination. It develops in close connection with the development of the entire personality, in the process of learning and upbringing, as well as in unity with thinking, memory, will and feelings.
It is very difficult to determine any specific age limits that characterize the dynamics of imagination development.
Despite the difficulty of determining the stages of human imagination development, certain patterns in its formation can be identified. So the first manifestations of imagination are closely related to the process of perception. For example, children aged one and a half years are still unable to listen to even the simplest fairy tales; they are constantly distracted or fall asleep, but listen with pleasure to stories about what they themselves have experienced. In this phenomenon, the connection between imagination and perception is quite clearly visible. The child listens to a story about his experiences because he clearly understands what is being said. The connection between perception and imagination continues to the next stage of development, when the child, in his games, begins to process the impressions received, modifying previously perceived objects in his imagination. The chair turns into a cave or an airplane, the box into a car. It should be noted that the first images of a child’s imagination are always associated with activity. The child does not dream, but embodies the processed image in his activity, even though this activity is a game.
An important stage in the development of imagination is associated with the age when the child acquires speech. Speech allows you to include in the imagination not only specific images, but also more abstract ideas and concepts. Moreover, speech allows the child to move from expressing images of imagination in activity to their direct expression in speech.
The stage of mastering speech is accompanied by an increase in practical experience and the development of attention, which allows the child to more easily identify individual parts of an object, which he perceives as independent and with which he increasingly operates in his imagination.
However, the synthesis occurs with significant distortions of reality. Due to the lack of sufficient experience and insufficient critical thinking, the child cannot create an image that is close to reality. The main feature of this stage is the involuntary nature of the emergence of images of the imagination. Most often, images of imagination are formed in a child of this age involuntarily, in accordance with the situation in which he finds himself.
The next stage in the development of imagination is associated with the emergence of its active forms. At this stage, the process of imagination becomes arbitrary. The emergence of active forms of imagination is initially associated with stimulating initiative on the part of an adult. Later, the child begins to use his own imagination without any adult participation. This leap in the development of imagination is reflected, first of all, in the nature of the child’s games. They become focused and story-driven. The object of a child's play often exists only in the imagination, just as for adults, the element of imagination is an important transition from the world of work to the world of play and leisure. The things surrounding the child become not just incentives for the development of objective activity, but act as material for the embodiment of the image of his imagination.
Another major shift in imagination occurs during school age. The need to understand educational material determines the activation of the process of recreating imagination. In order to assimilate the knowledge that is given at school, the child actively uses his imagination, which causes the progressive development of the ability to process images of perception into images of imagination.
Another reason for the rapid development of imagination during school years is that in the process of learning, the child actively receives new and diverse ideas about objects and phenomena of the real world. These ideas serve as a necessary basis for imagination and stimulate the student’s creative activity.
We can conclude that the main meaning of imagination is that without it any human work would be impossible, since it is impossible to work without imagining the final result and intermediate results. The activity of the imagination is always related to reality.
Conditions for the development of imagination
The child’s imagination is connected in its origins with the sign function of consciousness that emerges towards the end of early childhood. One line of development of the sign function leads from the replacement of objects with other objects and their images to the use of speech, mathematical and other signs and to the mastery logical forms thinking. Another line leads to the emergence and expansion of the ability to complement and replace real things, situations, imaginary events, to build new images from the material of accumulated ideas.
The child’s imagination develops in the game. At first, it is inseparable from the perception of objects and the performance of play actions with them. The child is riding on a stick, and at this moment he is the rider, and the stick is the horse. But he cannot imagine a horse in the absence of an object suitable for galloping, and he cannot mentally transform a stick into a horse at a time when he is not acting with it.
In the play of three- and four-year-old children, the similarity of the substitute object with the object that it replaces is essential.
In older children, imagination can also rely on objects that are not at all similar to those being replaced.
From the diary of V.S. Mukhina
Game on the floor.
Toys: a dog, a squirrel, a badger, two nesting dolls and a key. Ole-Lukoje's key. Two Matryoshka-Thumbelina. Kirill puts everyone to bed. Ole Lukoje comes up to everyone and blows on the back of their heads. (Kirill blows himself.) The animals woke up and began to jump: from the bookshelf to the painting, from the painting to bookshelf. And so 18 times. Then the animals went to drink the nectar that Thumbelina had prepared. Then there was the wedding of Ole-Lukoye (the little key) and two Thumbelina. Then everyone got tired and went to their usual place - on the shelf.
In this case, the key served as sufficient support for the child to imagine a wizard.
Gradually the need for external supports disappears. Interiorization occurs - a transition to playful action with an object that does not actually exist, and to a playful transformation of the object, giving it a new meaning and imagining actions with it in the mind, without real action. This is the emergence of imagination as a special mental process.
From the observations of K. Stern
Gunther's much-loved hopscotch game. A plan with numbered cells is drawn on the floor; then you need to throw a pebble into one of the cells and, jumping on one leg, knock it out of the cell without touching the line with your foot. Gunther sometimes plays this game in his room, without any equipment. He imagines a drawing on the floor, imagines throwing a pebble, is happy that he got into “100” (obviously, the drawing is very vividly drawn before his inner vision), jumps carefully so as not to touch the features, etc.
On the other hand, play can occur without visible actions, entirely in terms of presentation.
From the diary of V.S. Mukhina
Kirilka arranges toys around her. Lies down among them. He lies quietly for about an hour.
- What are you doing? Are you sick?
- No. I'm playing.
- How do you play?
- I look at them and wonder what’s happening to them.
Formed in play, imagination moves into other activities of the preschooler. It manifests itself most clearly in drawing and in the child’s writing of fairy tales and poems. Here, just as in a game, children first rely on directly perceived objects or those that appear under their strokes on paper.
From the observations of K. and V. Shternov
We managed to overhear the boy while he was drawing on the board. At first he wanted to draw a camel; he probably drew the head protruding from the body. But the camel was already forgotten; the side protrusion reminded him of the wing of a butterfly. He said: “Shall I draw a butterfly?”, erased the parts of the vertical line that protruded at the top and bottom and drew a second wing. Then came: “Another butterfly... Now I’ll draw another bird. Anything that can fly. Butterflies, birds, and then a fly will come.” Depicts a bird. “Now the moon! Flies, however, know how to bite,” and he put two dots (two pricks) on the board. The vertical line between them is also included in the image of the fly, but after drawing it, he exclaimed: “Oh, a fly! Let me draw the sun!” - I drew.
When writing fairy tales and poems, children reproduce familiar images and often simply repeat remembered phrases and lines. At the same time, preschoolers of three or four years old usually do not realize that they are reproducing what is already known. So, one boy once said: “Listen to how I composed: “A swallow flies towards us with spring in the canopy.” They are trying to explain to him that it was not he who composed it. But after a while the boy declares again: “I composed: “A swallow flies towards us with spring in the canopy.” Another child was also sure that he was the author of the following lines: “I am not afraid of anyone except my mother”... Do you like how I composed it? “They are trying to get him out of his delusion: “It was not you who composed this, but Pushkin: you are not afraid of anyone except God alone.” The child is disappointed, “And I thought that I composed this.”
In such cases, children's compositions are based entirely on memory, not including the work of imagination. However, more often the child combines images, introduces new, unusual combinations.
From the diary of E.I. Stanchinskaya
Yura composed a fairy tale: “Once upon a time there were two little devils. They had small house, there were little devils. They lived far, far away, beyond the sea, beyond the forest, beyond hot countries, in a large dark forest. Here was one old man riding on a golden-winged horse, riding and not knowing where his black horse was. The wolf said: “Go into the dark forest, and there is a step down, there are three doors: one, second, third.”
The wolf went with him, opened the doors, took the black horse, tied the golden-maned horse, sat on the black one, and the two horses rushed off. Etc.
It is not difficult to trace the origin of all the elements included in the fairy tale. These are images of familiar fairy tales, but their new combination creates a fantastic picture, not similar to the situations perceived by the child or told to him.
The transformation of reality in the child’s imagination occurs not only by combining ideas, but also by giving objects properties that are not inherent to them. Thus, children in their imaginations excitedly exaggerate or understate objects. One wants a tiny globe with everything on it “for real”: rivers and oceans, tigers and monkeys. Another tells how he built a “house up to the ceiling!” No, up to the seventh floor! No, to the stars!“
There is an opinion that a child’s imagination is richer than the imagination of an adult. This opinion is based on the fact that children fantasize for a variety of reasons. A three-year-old boy, drawing a corner, added a small hook to it and, amazed at the resemblance of this squiggle to a sitting human figure, suddenly exclaimed: “Oh, he’s sitting!” Another child, at the same age, one day playing tag and not catching up with the children, littered the ground. A moment later, he sat down on a bench and cried: “Now she will always make me greasy!” - “Who?” - they asked. - “Greasy Earth.” Another boy sincerely believed that stones could think and feel. He considered the cobblestones very unfortunate, because They are forced to see the same thing every day. Out of pity, the child carried them from one end of the road to the other.
However, the child's imagination is actually not richer, but in many respects poorer, than the imagination of an adult. A child can imagine much less than an adult, since children have more limited life experience and, therefore, less material for imagination. The combinations of images that the child constructs are also less varied.
At the same time, imagination plays a greater role in the life of a child than in the life of an adult, it manifests itself much more often and allows for a much easier departure from reality, a violation of life reality. The tireless work of imagination is one of the paths leading to children’s knowledge and mastery of the world around them, going beyond the limits of narrow-minded experience.
But this work requires constant supervision from adults, under whose guidance the child acquires the ability to distinguish the imaginary from reality.
The relationship between involuntary and voluntary imagination.
The imagination of preschool children is largely involuntary. The subject of imagination becomes something that greatly excites the child. Under the influence of feelings, children compose their own fairy tales. Very often, a child does not know in advance what his poem will be about: “I’ll tell you, then you’ll hear, but for now I don’t know,” he calmly declares.
Deliberate imagination, guided by a predetermined goal, is still absent in preschoolers of younger and middle age. It is formed by older preschool age in the process of developing productive types of activities, when children master the ability to build and implement a certain plan in a design.
The development of voluntary, deliberate imagination is the same as the development arbitrary shapes attention and memory is one of the sides general process formation of speech regulation and behavior of the child. Setting goals and guiding the construction of plans in productive activities is carried out with the help of speech. (1; p.257-261)
At primary school age, a child can already create a wide variety of situations in his imagination. Formed in playful substitutions of one object for another, imagination moves into other types of activity.
Under the conditions of educational activity, special demands are placed on the child’s imagination, which defeat him for voluntary actions of the imagination. In the classroom, teachers invite children to imagine a situation in which certain transformations of objects, images, and signs occur. These educational requirements stimulate the development of imagination, but they need to be reinforced with special tools - otherwise the child finds it difficult to advance in voluntary actions of the imagination. These can be real objects, diagrams, layouts, signs, graphic images and others.
By writing all kinds of stories, rhyming “poems,” inventing fairy tales, portraying various characters, children can borrow plots, stanzas of poems, and graphic images known to them, sometimes without noticing it at all. However, often a child deliberately combines well-known plots, creates new images, hyperbolizing certain aspects and qualities of his heroes. A child, if his speech and imagination are sufficiently developed, if he enjoys reflecting on the meaning and meaning of words, verbal complexes and images of the imagination, can come up with and tell an entertaining story, can improvise, enjoying his improvisation himself and including other people in it.
In the imagination, the child creates dangerous, scary situations. The main thing is overcoming, finding a friend, coming into the light, for example, joy. Experiencing negative tension in the process of creating and unfolding imaginary situations, managing the plot, interrupting images and returning to them trains the child’s imagination as a voluntary creative activity.
In addition, imagination can act as an activity that brings a therapeutic effect.
A child who has experienced difficulties in real life, perceiving his personal situation as hopeless, can go into an imaginary world. So, when there is no father, and this brings unspeakable pain, in the imagination you can acquire the most wonderful, most extraordinary, generous, strong, courageous father.
Imagination, no matter how fantastic it may be in its storyline, is based on the standards of real social space. Having experienced good or aggressive motives in his imagination, the child can thereby prepare for himself the motivation for future actions.
Imagination plays a greater role in the life of a child than in the life of an adult, manifesting itself much more often, and more often allowing for a violation of life reality.
The tireless work of imagination is the most important way for a child to learn and master the world around him, a way to go beyond the limits of personal practical experience, the most important psychological prerequisite for the development of creativity and a way to master the normativity of social space, the latter forces the imagination to work directly on the reserve of personal qualities.
Eiji Kamiya, famous Japanese teacher, professor at Bukyo University (Kyoto)
Specialist in the field of studying problems of imagination, thinking, emotions, play, environmental education of preschoolers
1.5 Imagination, expression, bodily dialogue
Preschool age can be considered as a transitional stage from the “natural” imagination to the “cultural” elements. Of course, for these elements to arise, the guidance of the educator is necessary. However, this guidance should be of a soft nature. The gentleness of guidance should be understood this way: without imposing the products of his imagination on children, the teacher proceeds from the embryonic forms of the imagination of the children themselves.
This is achieved through a variety of means. The teacher organizes dialogues in which each child expresses his or her vision of the subject. In this he is helped not only by the word, but by a physical image. Finally, the teacher initiates the group's "shared imagination" by including his or her own. Thus, the gentleness of the leadership ensures the unity of children’s interest with targeted pedagogical support.
This corresponds to the idea of L.S. Vygotsky, who defined learning in preschool age as “spontaneous-reactive”, in contrast to “spontaneous” at an early age and “reactive” at school age / see. footnote/.
Let's consider this situation using an example environmental education of children. The theme of one of the lessons is dedicated to the swallow. During its course, children are faced with the need to physically portray a character, which makes the images of their imagination more meaningful and underlies soft pedagogical guidance. The teacher, together with the children, examines the swallow chicks in the nest and the parents “raising” them several times. The teacher, first of all, tries to identify the uniqueness of the child’s vision of the situation and how the children develop their own assessment of the situation. Two types of views can be distinguished.
First - "actual" The child only describes the situation: " Baby swallows have eyes";"Their bodies are black". Answering the question of what the nest is made of, the child says: " From stones"; "From straws"etc. These assessments relate to the visible properties of objects that appear to children from a purely external perspective.
But children have another view - let's call it "human". It is based on imagination and allows you to see objects from the inside, allows you to penetrate into them on an emotional and sensory level. For example, by examining adult swallows in a nest, one is convinced that the birds are communicating with their children: “The Swallow took turns feeding her children, she is a gentle mother”; “The parents just said something to the kids” etc.
Children seem to penetrate into the “secret life” of swallows. This view reveals what the outstanding Swiss psychologist J. Piaget called childhood animism - the desire to endow the inanimate with a soul, emotions, feelings, etc. the child empathizes with the swallow as a creature equal in rights to all living things, including people, and himself. The “human” view can be correlated with what D.B. Elkonin called the “semantic field” in contrast to the “visible field”, which, according to our typology, corresponds to the “factual” view. The child, as it were, transfers to the chick the feeling that he himself experienced when he found himself in a similar situation.
Interpretation of reality through imagination
The “human” view is the interpretation of real phenomena through the imagination. It allows us to form a semantic “approach” to reality, within the framework of which future scientific knowledge will acquire a truly meaningful character. The teacher can show and develop a “human” view during special work, for example, on the topic “The Swallow Parents Have Arrived.”
Educator.Why did swallows land on electrical wires and not immediately into the nest?
Children. Answer A.They are a little tired and are resting there.
The swallows fly into the nest, but then return to the wires.
Answer B. They show the little ones how to fly.
Indeed, real - not imaginary - swallow parents teach their chicks to fly in this way. Children's imagination is in maximum contact with reality. However, the imagination is egocentric, animistic in nature.
With appropriate guidance, children's "human" perspective can develop in the direction of broadening creative potential imagination. Let's give another example.
Educator.Parent swallows often flew in, sat on the edge of the nest, looked at the chicks and flew away again.
Children. Answer A.Now the parents said something to the little ones.
Educator.What did they say?
Answer B. They asked, can you fly already?
This is how the transition from the visible to the “invisible” situation occurs, as evidenced by version B. When comprehending the picture of reality, the possibilities of the imagination expand. It becomes more and more mediated, less and less “tied” to the observed specific situation.
This is the transformation of the “natural” imagination into a “cultural”, truly creative one. But this transformation does not happen spontaneously. It is provided by gentle pedagogical guidance. It is aimed primarily at supporting children's expressive actions. Expressive and effective feeling for an object is simultaneously expressed and experienced by the child himself.
Deepening the Imagination through Expression
In order to pedagogically organize such feeling, the teacher uses a palette of means: observations of real objects, conversations about what he saw, a bodily image of his own understanding and emotional assessment of what he observed, singing, drawing, listening to a fairy tale related to the children’s experiences, free play. In addition to the last resort, the rest receive specification in a comprehensive lesson. The central elements from the point of view of the development of imagination are “conversation” and “bodily image”, although they are closely related to other elements. Let us give an example of discussion and bodily image from this practice.
Start of class. Children talk about the swallows they saw in the morning.
Answer A. The child swallows reached for the edge of the nest (when their parents arrived).
Answer B. When the mother swallow brought food, the children moved their wings.
Educator.Imagine that this is a nest. Show how the baby swallows behaved when their parents appeared.
Children begin to create a physical image. They imitate different reactions of chicks: A. wants to jump out of the nest at all costs; V., demanding food, sings loudly.
In this example, the bodily image of the children represents a memory of what they saw. Consequently, its form is reproductive in nature. Words and a bodily image, reproducing reality, are necessary to create a picture of the situation. This provides the necessary material for
In the future, the teacher creates conditions for in-depth bodily image. An example from this practice.
The game is unfolding.
Child A.The role of the mother swallow
Child V. The role of the baby swallow
A. Depicts how a swallow flies to its baby, feeds it, and then says something to it.
Educator. IN., Mom told you what? Remember.
Child V. Mom told me, fly yourself.
Educator. Dad and mom, look what your kids are doing.
Then the playing roles of parents and children are distributed among other children. The chicks move their wings and try to fly to their swallow parents. Parents contribute to this, for example, supporting children with wings (hands) until they learn to fly.
Body image allows children to make images of their imagination visible to others and to tell them about their emotions. Here children practically do not use external speech. They physically convey the feelings of swallows - children or parents, feelings that they were able to penetrate and empathize with (based on real experiences and listening to fairy tales).
Thus, the imagination deepens and expands through bodily imagination. This image presents the main elements and characteristics of imagination in general: the unity of “fantasy and reality”, orientation to the position of another “person”, creative processing of memories, activation of (non-external) speech.
Body image and dialogue in an imaginary situation
Over the course of two or three days, the children were engaged in drawing, showing how a family of swallows flies over the sea to the southern island. This was represented by a bodily image simulating travel. The children depicted waves that suddenly grew and tried to overtake the travelers. At first, the family of swallows seemed to be flying through the waves, but as the waves grew, they began to try to fly upward (the nature of their movements changed).
The main task was not to convey the actual picture of the “pursuit,” but the emotional state that the swallows experienced during this process. In a conditional situation, it is the creative imagination that should manifest itself, and not a simple memory of what was seen. This does not mean a separation of imagination from reality. The depiction of emotions and their experience by children themselves makes the reproduction of reality more complete and adequate.
But the most important thing is that a dialogue that is unique and varied in its forms arises here. The dialogue between the “wave children” and the “swallow children” simultaneously evokes a dialogue between the children playing and the children watching. A special place is occupied by the dialogue between the teacher and the children. The first and second dialogues are practically non-linguistic, physical in nature. Moreover, from the point of view of emotional expression, physical dialogue in preschool age can be richer and more meaningful than linguistic dialogue. Whose speech cannot depict everything (the writer V. Nabokov spoke about the “delights of the unnamed world”).
Firstly, bodily dialogue is possible only in an imaginary situation. The children really did not observe swallows over the sea without delving into their “relationship” with the waves. However, on an emotional level, this is exactly what needed to be imagined.
The remarkable Russian psychologist V.V. Davydov, the founder of the theory of developmental education, said that the activity of a preschool child should be desirable and joyful (see footnote). It is important to emphasize: these are not external or “background” attributes (“accompaniment”), but key, essential features of children’s activity. Well-known provisions about the unity of affect and intelligence (L.S. Vygotsky), the role of “smart” emotions and emotional anticipation (A.V. Zaporozhets) in the activities of preschool children serve as a concretization of this general understanding. Thus, only partial assistance, which develops into empathy, underlies the child’s familiarization with the human and humane. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the classic works of A.V. Zaporozhets. For example, while watching a play in a kindergarten, younger preschoolers jump up from their seats, run onto the stage, and begin to “assist” and “empathize” with the characters. In the same way, modern kids watch TV.
The effective-expressive form of experience is the original form of human emotion. It, like subsequent developed forms of emotionality, is internally connected with the imagination.
Secondly, bodily dialogue must be accompanied by an attempt to take the position of another “person”. As shown in the works of V.V. Davydov, V.T. Kudryavtsev, this is the most important, fundamental characteristic of the human imagination. By becoming another “person”, expressing his imaginary thoughts and emotions, the child simultaneously expresses his own thoughts and emotions. At the same time, children physically depict the inner meaning of the situation richer than verbally.
Thirdly, the bodily dialogue between playing children is closely related to other dialogues. As noted, a special dialogue begins not only between the players, but also between the children playing and the child spectators (and adults). If the bodily movements of children actually depict the thoughts and emotions of another “person” in an imaginary situation, the audience not only carefully observes what is happening, but also sympathizes with the characters and the players themselves, without separating the former from the latter, penetrate into the states they experience, and become infected with their emotional energy. When such “sympathy” arises from the audience, the players, in turn, receive emotional support from the child spectators. Only the teacher takes his specific place in this situation. He is verbally involved in an imaginary situation. The role of the teacher is to verbally recreate the picture, capture fairy-tale images, express the emotional state of the characters in words, and activate the joint imagination of children. Thus, the physical dialogue between the players creates the basis for other dialogues, more precisely, polylogues, which enriches the possibilities of both joint and individual imagination.
Children easily give in to their emotions, and are often even encouraged to do so. While for adults one of the main components of existence is work, children express themselves through play. As a result, the child expresses his feelings and emotions much more freely than adults. Imagination determines the nature of the impact of these feelings and emotions on thoughts and behavior; it enriches the child’s life. Endowing things and objects with magical and fantastic properties, he becomes so interested in them that he learns a lot of useful things about the world around him.
In a word, with the help of imagination, the baby develops his abilities with interest, learns and acquires a sense of self-importance. Fantasies give him a joyful opportunity to express himself creatively. Imagination is harmless, and often beneficial, for a child. If a child has a wild, cheerful, free imagination, this is a sign of health.
2. Practical part2.1 Who has a richer imagination: an adult or a child?
Why do preschoolers need to develop their imagination? It is already much brighter and more original than an adult’s imagination. Many people think so.
This is not entirely true. Psychologists' studies show that a child's imagination develops gradually as he accumulates certain experience. All images of the imagination, no matter how bizarre they may be, are based on those ideas and impressions that we receive in real life. In other words, the more and more varied our experiences, the higher the potential of our imagination.
That is why the child’s imagination is in no way richer, but in many respects poorer than the imagination of an adult. He has more limited life experience and, therefore, less material for fantasy. The combinations of images he constructs are also less varied. It’s just that sometimes a child explains in his own way what he encounters in life, and these explanations sometimes seem unexpected and original to us, adults. At the same time, in a child’s life, imagination plays more important role than in the life of an adult. It manifests itself much more often and is much more easily detached from reality. With its help, children learn about the world around them and themselves.
A child’s imagination must be developed from childhood, and the most sensitive, “sensitive” period for such development is preschool age. “Imagination,” wrote psychologist O.M. Dyachenko, who studied this function in detail, “is, as it were, an immediate musical instrument“, mastery of which opens up opportunities for self-expression, requires the child to find and fulfill his own plans and desires.”
Imagination can creatively transform reality, its images are flexible, mobile, and their combinations allow us to produce new and unexpected results. In this regard, the development of this mental function It is also the basis for improving the child’s creative abilities. Unlike the creative imagination of an adult, a child’s imagination does not participate in the creation of social products of labor. She participates in creativity “for herself”; no requirements for feasibility and productivity are imposed on her. At the same time, it is of great importance for the development of the very actions of imagination, preparation for upcoming creativity in the future.
1. Use object substitutes. External support plays an important role in the development of a child’s imagination. If at the early stages of development (at 3-4 years old) the imagination of a preschooler is inseparable from real actions with game material and is determined by the nature of the toys, the similarity of substitute objects with the replaced objects, then in children 6-7 years old there is no longer such a close dependence of play on game material. the imagination can also rely on objects that are not at all similar to those being replaced. For example, a child can ride on a stick, imagining himself as a rider and the stick as a horse. Gradually the need for external supports will disappear. Interiorization will occur - a transition to playful action with an object that does not actually exist, to the representation of actions with it in the mind. However, to do this, you must first teach the child to easily operate with various substitute objects. Such substitutes can be other objects, geometric figures, signs, etc.
2. Carry out “objectification” of an indefinite object.
Children begin to use the “objectification” method at the age of 3-4 years. It consists in the fact that a child can see a certain object in an unfinished figure. So, in the task of drawing an indefinite image, he can, for example, turn a circle into a wheel for a car or into a ball, a triangle into the roof of a house or into a sail for a ship, etc. By the age of 6-7, the child should already be relatively fluent in this method, and also learn to add various details to the “objectified” drawing.
3. Create images based on a verbal description or an incomplete graphic image.
This ability is very important for the child’s future educational activities. The need to create images based on verbal descriptions and graphic images arises when reading a book (figurative representation of the described situations, characters), when realizing the meaning of new words (figurative representation of objects and phenomena that these words mean), when recognizing objects when the field of their perception is limited (figurative representation an object, when it is not completely visible, but only some part of it is visible) and in some other situations. Moreover, the better a child’s ability to create such images is developed, the more accurate and stable ideas he develops. To develop this ability, you can use tasks in which the child must:
a) create an image of an object based on its verbal description;
b) recreate a complete image of a picture based on the perception of one or more of its parts.
4. Operate in your mind with images of simple multidimensional objects (spatial imagination).
All objects in the world around us exist in space. And the images of the imagination, to be adequate, must reflect the spatial characteristics of these objects. In this regard, it is very important to develop in a child the ability to “see” the image of an object, taking into account its spatial location. To train this ability, children of six years old can be offered two types of games:
a) to mentally transform an object in space,
b) representation of the relative position of several objects in space.
5. Subordinate your imagination to a specific plan, create and consistently implement the plan of this plan.
Only the consistent implementation of a plan can lead to the fulfillment of the plan. The inability to manage one’s ideas and subordinate them to one’s goal leads to the fact that the most interesting plans and intentions of a child often do not achieve their implementation. At this age, the child already has the necessary prerequisites for learning to act according to a pre-thought-out plan. Therefore, it is very important to develop this ability, to teach a child not just to fantasize aimlessly and fragmentarily, but to realize his plans, to create even small and simple, but complete works (drawings, stories, designs, etc.).
Teaching this skill should include the following steps:
I - stage of demonstration of the plan: an adult shows how to draw up a plan (diagram) of the finished product (design);
II - stage of independent “reading” of the plan: the child learns to “read” the plan (diagram) you have drawn up and create his own work based on it;
III - stage of independent drawing up of a plan: the child himself draws up a plan (scheme) of his own work.
Cognitive processes were examined in more detail, but one cannot fail to mention other skills that, to one degree or another, must be developed in a child before studying at school.
2.2 Test to identify the child’s level of development
Target: A test to determine the level of development of a child. How to Study Creativity
CREATIVE IMAGINATION
Prepare several geometric shapes of different colors and shapes from cardboard. The figures should be simple and complex, regular and irregular shape(circle, triangle, asterisk, rectangle, oval, etc.). They can also be different in size. Offer your child the following task: you will read him a fairy tale, let the child select its characters from the proposed geometric shapes.
Each figure is a specific symbol. Will your preschooler be able to complete your assignment? How does he perceive it: with interest or bewilderment?
Maybe he doesn’t perceive it at all, saying that the figures don’t look at all like the heroes of a fairy tale?
Attitude to the task - first indicator development of creative imagination.
Is the child capable of creative search? Does it deviate from the pattern? Is there really a similarity between a fairy-tale character and the chosen one?
geometric figure?
The ability to explain your choice, to somehow argue for the similarity of the figure and the hero of the fairy tale - second indicator development of creative imagination.
Third indicator– the child’s desire to continue playing and illustrate new stories.
Creative imagination presupposes the preschooler’s independence of thinking, ingenuity, and the ability to quickly navigate problematic situation, brightness, unexpectedness of emerging images, associations. Without creative imagination, it would be impossible to develop a child's creative abilities. (2; p.23-24)
2.3 Solving imaginative problems
Preparation of the study. Select album sheets for each child with figures drawn on them: outline images of parts of objects, for example, a trunk with one branch, a circle - a head with two ears, etc., and simple geometric figures(circle, square, triangle, etc.). Prepare colored pencils and markers.
Conducting research. A child of 7-8 years old is asked to complete each of the figures so that some kind of picture is obtained. First, you can have an introductory conversation about the ability to fantasize (remember what clouds look like in the sky, etc.).
Data processing. They reveal the degree of originality and unusualness of the image. Set the type of problem solving using imagination.
Null type. It is characterized by the fact that the child does not yet accept the task of constructing an imaginary image using this element. He doesn’t draw enough of it, but draws something of his own next to it (free imagination).
First type. The child completes the drawing of the figure on the card so that an image of a separate object (tree) is obtained, but the image is contoured, schematic, and devoid of details.
Second type. A separate object is also depicted, but with a variety of details.
Third type. By depicting a separate object, the child already includes it in some imaginary plot (not just a girl, but a girl doing exercises).
Fourth type. The child depicts several objects based on an imaginary plot (a girl walking with a dog).
Fifth type. The given figure is used in a qualitatively new way. If in types 1-4 it acts as the main part of the picture that the child drew (the circle is the head, etc.), then now the figure is included as one of the secondary elements to create an image of the imagination (the triangle is no longer the roof of the house, the lead of the pencil the boy uses draws a picture).
Developmental stage
This stage includes work on developing imagination, designed to connect the child’s creative potential.
Types of work.
A magazine of tall tales in faces.
The event is held in the form of a competition. The class is divided into two teams. Each team is the editorial office of the magazine. Each member of the editorial board has his own serial number. The presenter begins the tale:
Once upon a time there lived a little Vintik. When he was born, he was very beautiful, shiny, with brand new carvings and eight sides. Everyone said that a great future awaited him. He, along with some cogs, will participate in the flight on the spaceship. And then, finally, the day came when Vintik found himself on board a huge spaceship...
Actually interesting place the presenter stops with the words: “To be continued in the magazine..." in the issue....... "The child who has this issue in his hands must pick up the thread of the plot and continue the story. The presenter carefully follows the story and interrupts at the right place. The child must say: “To be continued in the magazine......”in the issue.....” The presenter can interrupt the fairy tale with the words: “End in the magazine........" in the issue.. ....."
As a result of children's creativity, the main character visited many planets and met aliens...
In general, this type of activity showed that it is still difficult for children to engage in free imagination. They do a better job using ready-made templates.
What does it look like?
The development of imagination plays a big role in the creative development of a child’s personality. It is necessary to include as much as possible in practice activities aimed at activating imagination processes. I would like to suggest next job in this direction.
This event is held in the form of a game. Up to 30 children can participate in it; it is better for the teacher or educator to take on the role of the leader. Children, with the help of a leader, select 2-3 people who should be isolated from the general group for a few minutes. At this time, everyone else thinks of a word, preferably an object. Then the isolated guys are invited. Their task is to guess what was asked using the question: “What does this look like?” For example, if the word “bow” is guessed, then the question: “What does it look like?” The following answers may come from the audience: “To the airplane propeller,” etc. As soon as the drivers guess what was asked, the leader changes them, and the game is repeated again.
This type of work allows children to develop imaginative thinking and promotes the activation of teamwork skills.
Photo moment.
This form of group activity is also aimed at developing imagination. However, its effectiveness is lower than the effectiveness of the activities described above. First of all, because only the driver is the object of active development here.
I will describe the methodology for conducting the event. After a short conversation on the topic “What is a photo moment”, explaining the meaning of this word, the teacher introduces the child to the world of photography: people always want to leave something as a memory of certain events, often this is a photograph. There are different photographs: funny and sad, small and large, color and black and white, there are photographs where people insert their faces into a small window cut out in a picture of animals, famous people etc.
Then the children choose one driver, who inserts his face into such a picture, not knowing what is drawn on it. His task is to guess who he is portraying by asking questions like:
Am I a plant?
I can fly?
Am I the object in this room? etc.
All the other guys can only answer his questions with the words: “Yes; No".
/>2.4 Tests for studying the development of imagination
Test: “Verbal (verbal) fantasy”
Invite the child to come up with a story (story, fairy tale) about any living creature (person, animal) or something else of his choice and present it orally within 5 minutes. Up to one minute is allotted to come up with a theme or plot for a story (story, fairy tale), and after that the child begins the story.
During the story, the child’s imagination is assessed according to the following indicators:
1.Quickness of imagination.
2.Unusuality, originality of imagination.
3. Richness of imagination, depth and detail of images.
4. Emotionality of images.
The speed of imagination is rated highly if the child came up with the plot of the story in the allotted time on his own.
If within one minute the child has not come up with a plot for the story, then tell him some plot.
The unusualness and originality of imaginative images are highly assessed if the child came up with something that he could not see or hear anywhere before, or retold what was known, but at the same time introduced something new and original into it.
The richness, depth and detail of fantasy are assessed by a sufficiently large number of different living beings, objects, situations and actions, various characteristics and signs attributed to all this in the child’s story, and the presence of various details and characteristics of images in the story.
If a child uses more than 7 such signs in his story, and the object of the story is not depicted schematically, then his wealth of imagination is well developed.
The emotionality of imaginary images is assessed by how vividly and enthusiastically the invented events, characters, and their actions are described.
Test: “Nonverbal fantasy”
Offer your child a drawing with different unfinished images and ask him to draw something interesting using these images (Fig. 41).
When the child makes a drawing, ask him to talk about what he depicted.
Result:
Stereotypical thinking, copying from others, low level of imagination.
Testing of a child is necessary, at a minimum, for the following purposes:
Firstly, to determine how well his level of development corresponds to the norms that are typical for children of this age.
Secondly, diagnostics are needed in order to find out the individual characteristics of the development of abilities. Some of them may be well developed, and some not so much. The presence of certain insufficiently developed intellectual abilities in a child can cause serious difficulties in the process of subsequent education at school. With the help of tests, these “weak points” can be identified in advance, and appropriate adjustments can be made to intellectual training
Third, tests can be useful to evaluate the effectiveness of the tools and methods you use to mental development child.
And finally, fourthly, children need to be introduced to various tests so that they are thus prepared for the testing tests that will await them both when entering school and at various stages of education in the future. Familiarity with typical test tasks will help them to avoid during such tests unnecessary emotional stress, or confusion, called the “surprise effect”, feel more confident and comfortable. Knowledge of these tests will allow them to equalize the chances with those who, for one reason or another, already have test experience.
According to psychoanalysts, one of the main functions of the imagination is to protect the individual, to compensate for negative experiences that are generated by preconscious processes and record social conflicts of the individual. In this regard, the effects of creative imagination-behavior are nothing more than the elimination of oppressive emotions (no matter what their sign) that arise in conflict until a level tolerable for the individual is reached. Therefore, it is not difficult to explain acts of creative activity, including children’s, in the types of productive activity available to them: drawing, modeling, and, less often, designing.
In general, one should talk about imagination as a mental process only if there is a functioning, full-fledged consciousness. Therefore, it can be argued that a child’s imagination begins its development at the age of three.
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Affective imagination arises in situations of contradiction between the image of reality existing in the child’s mind and the reflected reality itself.” The inability to resolve it leads to an increase in internal tension and, as a consequence, the emergence of anxiety and fear. Evidence of this is the fairly large number of fears in 3-year-old children 2 . At the same time, it should be noted that children resolve many of the contradictions on their own. And the affective imagination helps them with this. Thus, it can be argued that its main function is -protective, helping the child overcome the contradictions that arise. In addition, it also performs regulating function during the child’s acquisition of behavioral norms.
Along with it stands out educational imagination, which, like the affective one, helps the child overcome emerging contradictions, and, in addition, complete and clarify a holistic picture of the world. With its help, children master patterns and meanings, build holistic images of events and phenomena 3 .
Stages of imagination development.
Start first stage in the development of imagination is attributed to 2.5 years. At this age, imagination is divided into affective and cognitive. This duality of imagination is associated with two psychological new formations of early childhood, firstly, let us highlight the personal “I” and, in connection with this, the child’s experience of his separation from the world around him, and, secondly, with the emergence visually effective thinking. First
" Dyachenko O.M. On the main directions of development of imagination / Questions of psychology, 1988, No. 6. 2 Zakharov A.I. In K. op. ^ Dyachenko O. M. Uk. op.
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of these new formations forms the basis for the development of affective imagination, and the other - cognitive. By the way, the psychological intensity of these two determinants determines the role and significance of affective and cognitive imagination. The weaker the child’s “I”, his consciousness, the less adequately he perceives the surrounding reality, the more acute the contradictions that arise between the emerging image of reality and the reflected reality itself. On the other hand, the less developed a child’s objective thinking is, the more difficult it is for him to clarify and complete the real picture of the world around him.
Speaking about the psychological determinants of the development of imagination, we should also mention speech. Developed speech is a favorable factor in the development of imagination. It allows the child to better imagine an object that he has not seen, to operate with this image, i.e. think. Developed speech frees the child from the power of immediate impressions, allows him to go beyond their limits, and, therefore, build more adequate (consistent) images of the surrounding reality. It is no coincidence that delays in the development of speech also provoke delays in the development of imagination. An example of this is the poor, essentially rudimentary imagination of deaf children.
The development of cognitive imagination is carried out by a child in playing with toys, when familiar adult actions are not enacted and possible options for these actions (feeding children, walking with them, putting them to bed and other similar games).
The development of affective imagination is carried out through the child's replaying of experiences. They are mainly associated with experiences of fear. And if parents organize such games at home, they help eliminate fear. For example, a three-year-old boy asks to act out the fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs,” where the most significant
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and the moments he acts out are the scenes of the wolf appearing and running away from it. A wolf appears three times and three times our baby runs away from him squealing and screaming, hiding either in another room or behind a chair. And parents do the right thing if they help their child in this game.
Another example illustrates the parents’ lack of understanding of the psychological essence of what is happening. When asked whether their three-year-old daughter suffers from an excessive sense of fear, they unanimously answer that their girl, on the contrary, is very brave and is not afraid of anything. Proof of this, in their opinion, is that the girl constantly plays Baba Yaga and the Wolf. In fact, a child in a situation of affective imagination protects his “I” from experiences, acting out his fear in such a situation. Another example about the psychoprotective function of imagination in preschool age. Three-year-old Igor, walking with his mother, saw a large black cat and hid in fear behind his mother’s back. “I’m not afraid of the cat, I just give her way, because she’s very pretty,” is how he explains his action. And it’s a shame if the mother starts blaming or reproaching the baby for cowardice. After all, Igorek, in fact, models an imaginary situation and acts out his own fear.
In situations where a child has experienced a strong emotional experience or impression, it is important to play out similar situations with him at home so that the child can act out his experiences. There are other possibilities for this. If, for example, a child already draws or sculpts, he can do this in drawing or sculpting.
The mechanism of constructing imagination presupposes the presence of two sequential elements: generating an image of an idea And drawing up a plan for its implementation. At the first stage of imagination development, only the first of them is present - the image of an idea, which is built through objectification, when the child makes his own separate and incomplete impressions.
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development from reality is completed with the help of imagination into some objective whole. Therefore, the square can easily turn into a house or a doghouse. There is no planning of an imaginary action, as well as its products, at this stage of imagination development. It’s easy to verify this if you ask a 3-4 year old child to talk about what he is going to draw or sculpt. He won't answer your question. The fact is that the imagination creates the idea itself, which is then objectified in the image. Therefore, the child first appears with a drawing, image, figure, and then its designation (remember the description of the appearance of the drawing given in the previous paragraph). Moreover, any suggestions to the child to draw up a plan in advance and then act on it led to the destruction of the activity and abandonment of it.
Second phase begins in the development of imagination at 4-5 years old. There is an active assimilation of norms, rules and patterns of behavior, which naturally strengthens the child’s “I” and makes his behavior more conscious in comparison with the previous period. Perhaps this circumstance is the reason for the decline in creative imagination. How do affective and cognitive imaginations relate?
Affective imagination. At this age, the frequency of occurrence of persistent fears decreases (since with the development of consciousness, the effects of distorted perception of the surrounding reality decrease). Usually affective imagination healthy child arises in connection with the experience of real trauma. For example, a five-year-old child, after undergoing surgery, operated on his bear cub friend for a month, reenacting the most traumatic elements of the operation: anesthesia, removal of stitches, etc. Sustainable internal conflicts manifest themselves in the construction of substitute situations: for example, a child comes up with a story about a bad boy who does pranks and the like instead of him.
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Cognitive imagination at this age is closely related to the development of role-playing and productive activities - drawing, modeling, designing.
At this age, the child still follows the image (the image “guides” the child’s actions) and therefore he mainly reproduces the patterns of behavior of adults and peers known to him in roles, drawings, etc. But since the child already speaks well, he begins to develop elements of planning. The child plans one step of action, then takes it, carries it out, sees the result, then plans the next step, etc. From four to five years of age, children move to step planning. For example, before drawing something, the child says: “Here I’ll draw a house” (draws it), “and now a pipe” (draws it), “window” (draws it), etc. The possibility of step planning brings children to directed verbal creativity, when they compose fairy tales, as if stringing one event onto another.
Third stage in the development of imagination begins in 6-7 years. At this age, the child masters basic patterns of behavior and gains freedom to operate with them. He can deviate from standards, combine them, using these standards in constructing products of the imagination.
Within this stage affective imagination is aimed at eliminating the resulting psycho-traumatic effects by repeatedly varying them in play, drawing and other types of productive, creative activities. In case of persistent conflicts with reality, children turn to a substitute imagination.
At this age, the child’s creativity is projective in nature, which symbolizes stable experiences. For example, a boy brought up in conditions of hyperprotection, when completing a task, draws the Snake of the Mountain with spikes on his head. When asked why he needs these thorns, he replies that Zmey Gorynych purposely made them
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He grew it so that no one could sit on his head. Thus, we see that creative activities can also act as ways to compensate for traumatic experiences.
Cognitive imagination at this stage undergoes qualitative changes. Children six years, in their works they not only convey processed impressions, but also begin to purposefully look for techniques for conveying them. For example, when finishing drawing unfinished images, a square can easily turn into a brick that rises crane. An important point in development is that it first appears holistic planning, when a child first builds an action plan and then consistently implements it, adjusting it along the way. If at this age a child is asked what he is going to draw, he will answer something like this: “I will draw a house, a garden next to it, and a girl walks around and waters the flowers.” Or: “I’ll draw the New Year. The Christmas tree is standing, next to Father Frost and the Snow Maiden, and under the tree there is a bag of gifts.”
0-M. Dyachenko notes that the described three stages of imagination development represent the possibilities of each age. IN natural conditions, without guidance from adults, everything mentioned above is realized by only a fifth of children of each age. Parents, doctors and teachers need to know about this.”
And one more note. It must be remembered that affective imagination without sufficient recovery from trauma can lead to pathological stagnant experiences or to the child’s autism, to the creation of a life that replaces the imagination.
In turn, cognitive imagination tends to gradually fade away. Talking about meaning
Dyachenko O.M. Uk. op.
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imagination, one should point out the advanced nature of its development in comparison with thinking. This means that thinking develops on the basis of imagination. Thus, it is simply impossible to overestimate the importance of imagination in the mental development of a child as a whole.
Development of imagination
Based on research by L.S. Vygotsky, it is important to note that the sensitive period of imagination development is preschool age. A child’s imagination develops most productively under the influence of adults.
A.G. Maklakov notes that the development of imagination occurs during human ontogenesis and requires the accumulation of a certain stock of ideas, which can later serve as material for creating images of the imagination. Imagination develops in close connection with the development of the entire personality, in the process of training and education, as well as in unity with thinking, memory, will and feelings.
Despite the difficulty of determining the stages of development of imagination in humans, certain patterns in its formation can be identified. Thus, the first manifestations of imagination are closely related to the process of perception. The connection between perception and imagination is visible when a child begins to process received impressions in his games, modifying previously perceived objects in his imagination (a chair turns into a cave or an airplane, a box into a car). But the first images of a child’s imagination are always associated with activity. The child does not dream, but embodies the processed image in his activity, and the leading type of activity of the child is play.
The next stage, highlighted by A.G. Maklakov, is associated with the age when a child masters speech. Speech allows you to include in the imagination not only specific images, but also more abstract ideas and concepts. Moreover, speech allows the child to move from expressing images of imagination in activity to their direct expression in speech.
The stage of mastering speech is accompanied by an increase in practical experience and the development of attention, which allows the child to more easily identify individual parts of an object, which he already perceives as independent and with which he increasingly operates in his imagination. However, the synthesis occurs with significant distortions of reality. Due to the lack of sufficient experience and insufficient critical thinking, the child cannot create an image that is close to reality. The main feature of this stage is the involuntary nature of the emergence of imagination. Most often, images of imagination are formed in a child of this age involuntarily, in accordance with the situation in which he finds himself.
The next stage in the development of imagination, which is highlighted by A.G. Maklakov, is associated with the appearance of its active forms. At this stage, the process of imagination becomes voluntary. The emergence of active forms of imagination is initially associated with stimulating initiative on the part of an adult. For example, when an adult asks a child to do something, he activates the imagination process. Later, the child begins to use his own imagination without any adult participation. This leap in the development of imagination is reflected, first of all, in the nature of the child’s games. They become focused and story-driven. The things surrounding the child become not just stimuli for the development of objective activity, but act as material for the embodiment of images of his imagination.
Another major shift in imagination occurs during school age. The need to understand educational material determines the activation of the process of recreating imagination. In order to assimilate the knowledge that is given at school, the child actively uses his imagination, which causes the development of the ability to process images of perception into images of imagination. But it should be noted that the recreating imagination is not always capable of developing vivid images. This may be due to a misunderstanding of the material being studied (high speed of material delivery, an insufficient amount information and more). In this case, the reconstructive imagination will not develop properly, which may negatively affect the further development of the child’s psyche.
People's imagination is developed differently, and it manifests itself differently in their activities and social life. Individual characteristics of the imagination are expressed in the degree of development of the imagination, which is characterized by the vividness of the images and the depth with which the data of past experience is processed, as well as the novelty and meaningfulness of the results of this processing. Poor development of imagination is expressed in a low level of processing of ideas and entails difficulties in solving mental problems that require the ability to visually imagine a specific situation. With an insufficient level of imagination development, a rich and emotionally diverse life is impossible.
Knowledge of the mechanisms of imagination development plays an important role in studying the psyche of normally sighted people and people with impaired vision. It is important to understand that imagination with impaired vision develops according to the same laws as with normal vision and has the same importance in the lives of the blind and visually impaired as in the lives of the sighted. But, at the same time, the process and development of the imagination of people with impaired vision has a number of features, which will be discussed in the next chapter, where I analyzed research conducted within the framework of special psychology.