Features of Thinking of Modern Preschool Children with Mental Retardation

The mental development of modern children takes place in a social and cultural environment that is radically different from the conditions of development of past generations. This is due to the intensive introduction of digital technologies in all areas of the child's activity — communication, play, study. The shift of children's activity into a virtual environment, from real interaction with people and things to the manipulation of media images, cannot but affect the formation of a child's mental processes. However, this question still remains debatable. The purpose of this study was to clarify the features of the formation of thinking of modern preschool children. For this purpose, an analyses of “pre-digital” studies of preschool children's thinking was carried out. Our own empirical research has been conducted, accurately reproducing the methodology of those experiments. For the study of visual-effective thinking — the “Composing a Whole from Parts” technique; for the study of visual-figurative thinking — the “Classification of images of familiar objects” technique; for the study of verbal-logical thinking — the technique of “Making conclusions based on two initial judgments”. The archival study sample included 34 children with mental retardation and 20 children with normative development aged 6,5 to 7 years. The sample of the modern study is represented by groups of children with intellectual disability and normative development, consisting of 15 people each, aged from 6,2 to 6,8 years. It is established that modern preschoolers less often than their peers of previous years, cope with tasks that involve generalization and comparison of subjects when mediated by a word. At the same time, they performed the tasks for the study of visual-effective thinking faster, they were oriented to actively and independently correct their mistakes, without waiting for the help of an adult.

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