Why is “the science of the soul” becoming an exact discipline? Does the city need a driver and pedestrian behavior specialist? Is it true that discoveries in the field of artificial intelligence are being made at the intersection of psychology, programming and ethics? What are psychologists doing to bring about a new technological era? The correspondent of the "Social Navigator" MIA "Russia Today" talked about this with Ivan Khvatov, Candidate of Psychology, Associate Professor of the Department of General Psychology of the Institute of Experimental Psychology of the Moscow State Psychological and Pedagogical University.
Ivan Aleksandrovich, what does cognitive psychology do?
- She is doing what is called "mind". Translated - mind, cognitive processes. These usually include memory, attention, perception, understanding, thinking, decision making.
How are discoveries in psychology reflected in the daily life of a person?
- I would like to note that it is growing from a purely humanitarian discipline into a science that can offer very specific technologies for solving practical problems. Or to carry out very specific activities, such as forensics, marketing, parent counseling, sports, medicine, law, transport navigation. This is not a complete list of areas that need the help of a psychologist.
How can a psychologist be useful, for example, for a city architect or topographer?
- Here you are driving along a busy street, looking for the desired sign, sign or road markings. But you don't even guess that it is the psychologist who helps to arrange this information in space in such a way that it is conspicuous, imprinted in the mind and at the same time does not cause negative feelings in other drivers and pedestrians.
Or another situation. My colleagues and I are developing automatic animal feeders. They are needed by people who are away from home for a long time. A special program will calculate the biorhythms of the animal, its appetite, control the cultivation and feeding of live larvae or other products to the feeder tray. And all this in such a way that the animal would eat them.
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You ask: what is the psychologist for? But in order for a pet to be satisfied, you have to take into account its customs and tastes, to know its psyche.
Psychology translated from Latin means "the science of the soul." Does a person have a soul? Is it still a subject of study by psychologists?
- I think that the etymology of many terms has not coincided for a long time with what they actually mean. So it happened with psychology. As a matter of fact, it has moved into the category of exact sciences, found itself on a par with physics, chemistry, biology, and programming. Today it is based on experiments, deals with quantitatively accurate patterns, and uses rigorous methods for testing hypotheses. At the same time, traditionally, this science works with personal data, includes testing, applies its knowledge in counseling, group and psychotherapy.
Natural science (experimental) and cognitive psychology help to understand why we make certain decisions, remember certain elements in the events that we have experienced, pay attention to certain processes. And in the future they use the data obtained in order, for example, to learn how to predict human behavior in extreme situations.
In the long term, this allows you to write a program that, by reading a number of human behavioral patterns, will help predict his actions for a period of time, sometimes not exceeding a few seconds. This can be important in the field of training specialists in high-risk areas. In this respect, psychology is close to programming, to the study of artificial intelligence.
“The integration of human intelligence and computers is associated with the onset of a new technological era, which will dramatically increase the productivity of mental work. What contribution will psychologists make to the creation of a "neuronet"?
- The design of the so-called neurocomputer interface is impossible without the participation of psychologists on a par with biologists, IT engineers, physiologists, and ethics specialists. It requires knowledge of the psychophysiological and behavioral parameters of a person at a high level, knowledge of programming languages. Therefore, we teach this to students.
Graduates of MSUPE participate in the creation of technologies that allow using the body's biopotentials to control external technical devices. It can be a computer, a mechanical arm, a wheelchair, a car. Within the framework of the master's program "Cognitive Psychology" and the bachelor's program in experimental psychology, we train experimental psychologists who will be able to obtain objective knowledge for the subsequent design of various devices, devices, technologies.
