Emotional and Cognitive Development of Preschool Children: Overview of International and Russian Studies on Role of Dialectical Thinking in the Regulation of Affect and Recognition of Complex Feelings

The article contains an overview of studies on the problem of emotional and cognitive development of preschool children (43 papers, including 6 in Russian and 37 in English) conducted in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Spain, Germany, Norway, Russia, etc). Special attention is paid to works that consider the reflexive aspect of childrens experiences characterized by duality, inconsistency and multypositionality, which makes it possible to identify and trace the line of dialectical transformations based on preschool childrens emotional experiences. The following statements are formulated as key conclusions: (1) dialectical thinking can be considered as a cognitive mechanism necessary for the analysis of complex, ambivalent and hidden feelings; (2) the unit of cognitive and affective development is experience, which involves reliance on an internal dialectical structure; (3) a two-position perspective in the game activity is a condition for forming preschool childrens dialectical thinking operations, which in turn can become a cognitive mechanism for regulating affect; (4) the cognitive basis of the emotional anticipation phenomenon includes a mental action of changing the alternative, which is in the zone of proximal development of preschool children and allows adults to use it as a mechanism of emotional co-regulation; and (5) philosophical dialog practices, which imply a discussion of problematic-contradictory content with preschoolers and are aimed at forming in them such actions of dialectical thinking as transformation, mediation and change of alternatives. These provisions represent are an effective tool for developing the ability to distinguish dual complex feelings and analyze their causes and consequences. The results of the work can serve as a basis for creating and implementing conceptually new preschool education programs aimed at both the creative and emotional development of children, where dialectical thinking is considered, inter alia, as an ability necessary for regulating affect and helping children to experience and cope with complex conflicting feelings.

University Philosophy Course: Reboot is Required

The philosophical training of tertiary-level students is designed to perform a number of functions assigned to it by society and the state. However, in recent years, it is no longer in demand by the majority of the educational process participants, since the university philosophy does not respond well to modern challenges from education, primarily to the need of digitalization and competence approach implementation. To preserve the disciplinary status of philosophy, the lecturers have to modernize the content, methods and forms of implementation of the discipline in order to increase its attractiveness in students’ minds, as well as the demand by society and the state. One of the possible ways to update the training course of philosophy is seen in its reorientation towards the development of students’ universal competencies prescribed in the state educational standards. In this case, the philosophical content becomes a tool to achieve this goal, and the philosophical heritage is used as a theoretical basis for mastering the technologies of mental action. The article presents the experience of Kazan University, where the philosophy course has recently become a tool for “system and critical thinking” competence training. Although a digital format of philosophical training has a number of cognitive advantages, nevertheless it is fraught with the risk that the philosophical value potential will not be fully realized. This risk can be minimized through a mixed format of teaching philosophy. Тo increase the demand for philosophy in higher education, the author offers a number of ways to enhance the role and importance of philosophy in students’ minds.

Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference

Meta-awareness refers to the capacity to explicitly notice the current content of consciousness and has been identified as a key component for the successful control of cognitive states, such as the deliberate direction of attention. This paper proposes a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference. To do so, we cast mental action as policy selection over higher-level cognitive states and add a further hierarchical level to model meta-awareness states that modulate the expected confidence (precision) in the mapping between observations and hidden cognitive states. We simulate the example of mind-wandering and its regulation during a task involving sustained selective attention on a perceptual object. This provides a computational case study for an inferential architecture that is apt to enable the emergence of these central components of human phenomenology, namely, the ability to access and control cognitive states. We propose that this approach can be generalized to other cognitive states, and hence, this paper provides the first steps towards the development of a computational phenomenology of mental action and more broadly of our ability to monitor and control our own cognitive states. Future steps of this work will focus on fitting the model with qualitative, behavioural, and neural data.

EEG Activity During Mental Influence on a Random Signal Generator

This preliminary study is based on 38 experimental sittings in which 22 participants attempted to mentally influence an electronic circuit called RSG (Random Signal Generator), while their cerebral activity was recorded by a 14-channel EEG. Subject to sampling, signal peaks with an absolute value greater than a predetermined threshold were selected from the analogical RSG output by a computer program. Whenever a signal exceeded the threshold, an audible ‘beep’ sounded and the participant was asked to mentally increase the frequency of these beeps as much as possible, because a higher beep rate meant a successful mental influence attempt on the RSG. An important objective was to verify the existence of any relationship between a successful mental influence of the RSG and cerebral activity in the participant attempting the influence. Compared to an equal number of ‘inactive’ sittings made without anyone attempting mental action, the ‘active’ sittings show a small increase in the average number of beeps/minute, but in particular a significant increase in the emitted beeps within 1.5 seconds of the previous beep (P <0.025). The experimental sittings were divided into two groups (around 50% each), of which the first had better results, and only the frontal and fronto-temporal symmetrical EEG locations (AF3, AF4, F7, F8, F3, F4, Fc5, Fc6) were examined. The better group showed a significant reduction in Brain Synchrony (P < 0.03) together with an equally significant increase in Beta and Gamma 15-42 Hz (P < 0.03) activity. These differences were interpreted as an effect of greater mental work performed by the better group during mental influence of the RSG. This is the first study to investigate the relationship between EEG activity and mind-matter (PK) interaction at a distance; indeed all studies devoted to PK have only focused attention on the object of attempted mental action, which was predominantly an RNG (Random Number Generator).

First-person dimensions of mental agency in visual counting of moving objects

Counting objects, especially moving ones, is an important capacity that has been intensively explored in experimental psychology and related disciplines. The common approach is to trace the three counting principles (estimating, subitizing, serial counting) back to functional constructs like the Approximate Number System and the Object Tracking System. While usually attempts are made to explain these competing models by computational processes at the neural level, their first-person dimensions have been hardly investigated so far. However, explanatory gaps in both psychological and philosophical terms may suggest a methodologically complementary approach that systematically incorporates introspective data. For example, the mental-action debate raises the question of whether mental activity plays only a marginal role in otherwise automatic cognitive processes or if it can be developed in such a way that it can count as genuine mental action. To address this question not only theoretically, we conducted an exploratory study with a moving-dots task and analyze the self-report data qualitatively and quantitatively on different levels. Building on this, a multi-layered, consciousness-immanent model of counting is presented, which integrates the various counting principles and concretizes mental agency as developing from pre-reflective to increasingly conscious mental activity.

I overthink—therefore I am not: Altered Sense of Self in Depersonalisation Disorder

This paper considers the phenomenology of depersonalisation disorder, in relation to predictive processing and its associated pathophysiology. To do this, we first establish a few mechanistic tenets of predictive processing that are necessary to talk about phenomenal transparency, mental action, and self as subject. We briefly review the important role of ‘predicting precision’ and how this affords mental action and the loss of phenomenal transparency. We then turn to sensory attenuation and the phenomenal consequences of (pathophysiological) failures to attenuate or modulate sensory precision. We then consider this failure in the context of depersonalisation disorder. The key idea here is that depersonalisation disorder reflects the remarkable capacity to explain perceptual engagement with the world via the hypothesis that “I am an embodied perceiver, but I am not in control of my perception”. We suggest that individuals with depersonalisation may believe that ‘another agent’ is controlling their thoughts, perceptions or actions, while maintaining full insight that the ‘another agent’ is ‘me’ (the self). Finally, we rehearse the predictions of this formal analysis, with a special focus on the psychophysical and physiological abnormalities that may underwrite the phenomenology of depersonalisation.

The Shape of Agency

After offering accounts of basic building blocks of agency in chapters 2 through 5, this chapter serves as a hinge. Here, drawing on Tyler Burge’s work on primitive agency, this chapter discusses the most primitive features of agency, and considers what must be added to work towards more sophisticated kinds of agent. The main aim is to articulate a kind of (metaphorical) ladder that allows us to see, not only the shape of agency in relief, but also the place of key capacities like a capacity for representation of targets for behavior, and a capacity of practical reasoning. This leads, at the chapter’s very end, to a brief discussion of the role of mental action in an understanding of agency.