An article about the work of psychologists was published in the journal "Psychological Studies". Due to the existence of speech, human thinking can function with abstract signs. The verbal structures of varying degrees of abstract allow the picture of the world of one person to stabilize and synchronize with the picture of the world of the other. This gives people the opportunity to jointly make decisions and perform a variety of tasks.
At the same time, the shaped structures are still present in our thinking on the rights of an alternative "language", which makes it possible to collect with the help of words together, the disassembled components of thought. In other words, thinking is carried out on two "languages": verbal and logical and shaped. The first is more about the analysis operation, the second - synthesis. Full transfer from one "language" to another, without losses of meaningful important units of thought is important for successful and productive thinking.
"At the heart of our study, I lay the question - as the work of a verbal-logical language affects the accuracy of the image created by thinking," says one of the authors of the study, the graduate student of the Department of General Psychology SPbSU Nadezhda Novikovskaya. - As a stimulus material, we used concrete and abstract concepts.
It is believed that abstract concepts are more represented by the "bleeding" words and signs of the language, and the specific - elements of the sensory and motor experience of a person. For example, we can easily actualize the concept of "hedgehog", remembering the little barbed animal, snorting in the bushes at the cottage. Much more complex things are with some abstract concept - such as, for example, "solution".
Psychologists asked for respondents to verbalize the meaning of several pre-selected concepts by writing short essays to them or giving them written definitions. The procedure had to activate the verbal logical "language" of thinking. In order to activate the figurative "language", they requested participants to portrait the concepts using icons (signs displaying the most important object features). Participants were divided into several groups that differ in the procedure for performing tasks: Pictographicing and writing definition or essay.
With the help of a multi-stage examination procedure, psychologists have identified key signs of stimulus concepts. For example, the following: first - the presence of two autonomous participants in the process, which binds the second sign - the impact of one participant to another, and the cause of changes in one participant are changes in the other - this is the third sign.
Next, the authors of the study were analyzed which of these signs are present in the drawings and texts of the subjects. They assumed that writing the text would help activate the necessary signs, which, in turn, will allow participants to draw more complete and accurate pictograms. "It turned out that verbalization does not improve the quality of images, and the pictographication does not help writing more accurate texts.
However, if the thinking "fruitfully worked" on one "language", then with a high probability with another "language", the story will repeat. This means that a high level of understanding implies close cooperation of verbal and figurative components of intellectual activity. Conclusion: If you want to develop something one, develop everything together, "Nadezhda Novikovsky notes.
Verbalize the concepts of the test on average turned out to be easier than to portray them graphically, despite the fact that they were not asked to draw beautiful pictures - it was necessary only to reflect important signs from a semantic point of view. According to the author of the study, it can be explained by the fact that we live in the era of "memes" and "Storsith" and are accustomed to handling ready-made visual content. At the same time, creating your own content turned into a complex and unusual task for most.
According to the head of research, the associate professor of the department of general psychology and an employee of the laboratory of behavioral neurodynamics SPbSU Olga Shcherbakova, in the first figure the concept of "influence" is illustrated with a specific example limited by a socio-psychological context. In this case, the idea of the "dominance-submission relationship" relationship was transferred, but more general in relation to it the concept of influence remains not disclosed due to the principal orientation of the author for private signs.
In the second figure, the concept of "influence" is represented differently. With the help of cost-effective graphics, the idea is main in terms of content: a change in one object as a result of an effect on it. "It is important to remember that to revive the figurative components of thinking helps reading long texts and fantasizing the object support," the psychologist advises.
The surprise for researchers was that people better understand the meaning of abstract concepts than concrete, despite the fact that the latter, at first glance, seem simpler and intuitively clear. According to scientists, it is likely that the specific concepts are so strongly "stuck" to household contexts, which mentally separate them from the usual situations of use to intently analyze the content, becomes difficult.
In other words, we easily operate with specific concepts in everyday life, using them automatically and not thinking about their meaning. As a result, allocate important signs of these concepts is not easy. It is often expressed in the fact that people are graphically depicting or described by some one one, not the most significant sign of the concept or use a stereotype, without understanding its meaning.
"Abstract concepts" live "among themselves similar, their activation is associated with the work of thinking at higher levels of generalization, so their understanding is more efficient. It can be assumed that the attempt of our thinking to save a resource using the same mental template to represent usual things, leads to the fact that significant signs of concepts are sometimes lost, "explains Olga Shcherbakov.
- The conclusion with which many practitioners of psychologists will agree: mistakes that hinder us to live are hiding in our most familiar and familiar thoughts. And the expression "see in the New World" is actually about the fact that the context of the context helps us to discover something important what we have not noticed before. "
The results of the study can be used in educational activities for the development of conceptual thinking, whose deficit has recently been observed both in schoolchildren and for adults formed. Continuing the authors see in a qualitative analysis of strategies for the concepts of the concepts of varying degrees of generalization and the study of the neurocognitive foundations of the functioning of an individual conceptual system. The study was completed with the financial support of the RFBR under scientific project No. 19-33-51016.
Source: Naked Science