Shal' L.G. Peculiarities of the Relation Between Visual Perception and Visual Thinking of Primary School Students with Different Ontogenesis

Abstract: The subject under research is the peculiarities of visual perception and visual thinking demonstrated by primary school students with different ontogenesis when perceiving genre paintings. The article contains the theoretical analysis of visual functions and visual thinking of primary school students with different ontogenesis. New psychological literature on diagnostics of child's mental development focuses extensively on visual perception and visual thinking as the prerequisites for successful education. Thus, it is becoming an urgent issue to study the relation between visual perception and visual thinking of school students with different mental impairments as a result of medical diagnoses such as minimal brain dysfunction and autism spectrum. The methodological basis of the research involves contemporary views of Russian psychologists on the objective laws of the development of higher mental functions described by Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria taking into account the unevenness of their development during ontogenesis as well as the mechanisms of mental impairments described by the neuropsychological approach. Traditional methods of diagnostics of the higher mental functions are the methods of neuropsychological diagnostics allowing to perform the comparative analysis of the level of the development of particular higher mental functions. This is the first research in the academic literature to describe the relation between visual perception and visual thinking, to create a classification of mistakes and to discuss the influence of these mistakes on the level of understanding of genre paintings by primary school students with different ontogenesis. As a result of the research, Shal' has found out that children suffering from minimal brain dysfunction and autism spectrum with normal ontogenesis have a deficiency of visual perception which has an impact on visual thinking, too. Consequently, visual thinking does not always support teaching activities where there is the deficiency of visual perception. These results have allowed to define the 'targets' for corrective measures of school psychologists working with primary school children. 

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