Will and Self-Regulation: An Interdisciplinary Research Experience

Abstract

The paper presents outcomes and perspectives of the research on the development of will and self-regulation in childhood. The authors implement an interdisciplinary approach that combines psychological, pedagogical, physiological, and neurophysiological exploration of the problem. Will and self-regulation are considered not only as the phenomena of different phenomenology, but also as differing in their genesis. Priority is given to the line of will development associated with the formation of internal movements, corporeality, individuality. It is on this path that self-regulation of behavior is successfully formed. ‘Premature self-regulation’, on the contrary, makes it difficult for free will to develop. At the focus of the interdisciplinary research is the pedagogical technology “School for Developing Individuality” (“Rostok”), which is currently being implemented at an experimental site in Novosibirsk. The psychological views of the authors are in the mainstream of the cultural-historical tradition founded by L.S. Vygotsky, the approaches to the problem of will and self-regulation development of L.I. Bozhovich, A.V. Zaporozhets, A.N. Leontiev. The article, on the one hand, summarizes the results of the many years of work, and on the other hand, outlines the prospects that are associated, in particular, with the continuation of neurophysiological studies carried out on the experimental site. Even the first results obtained make it possible not only to capture objectively the various developmental mechanisms in children learning by different pedagogical technologies, but also to identify new neurophysiological phenomena and to reveal the psychological background of neurophysiological phenomena that have been discovered recently and are still mysterious for science, for example, the default mode network.