Место издания:University of San Diego San Diego, United States
Первая страница:62
Последняя страница:62
Аннотация:According to Vygotsky's (1931/1997) ideas and experimental data, both selective and sustained attention should be considered as mediated forms of human cognition. In addition to primary forms of attentional mediation, such as indicative gestures and fixation of external cues, in the course of cognitive development there emerges a linguistic one. Language, which in turn develops to a great extent due to the joint attention mechanisms (e.g. Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), becomes one of the most important sources of mediation for attentional processes in adult humans. For instance, words rather than separate letters or phonemes become units that guide attention and organize human perceptual activity in a rapidly changing information environment and under high mental load. In numerous recent studies of visual attention, this phenomenon, primarily outlined in an early study by J.M. Cattell (1886), is referred to as a «word superiority effect». This form of visual attention mediation has been described for a number of experimental phenomena, including the attentional blink (Falikman, 2002), metacontrast masking (Luiga et al., 2003), lateral masking, or crowding (Fine, 2001), and visual search (Pantyushkov et al., in press). In adult readers, the further integration has been observed, with sentences becoming new attentional units allowing to avoid transient failures of visual attention such as the attentional blink (Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2007). Some theoretical implications of these effects within the framework of the mediation principle and the theory of activity will be discussed.