N.A. Bernstein’s Principles of Physiology of Activity in Psychology of Perception and Attention: Problems and Perspectives

Abstract

The paper reviews N.A. Berstein’s creative legacy in the development of Russian research in visual perception and attention starting from 1960s. It describes how these studies adopted four groups of concepts from Bernstein’s biocybernetics: first, the metaphor of movement construction; second, the concept of task; third, the idea of levels (hierarchy) of movement construction; and fourth, the principle of feedback or circular control of movement. The paper also discusses modern Russian level-based concepts of perception and attention that directly originated from Bernstein’s ideas. It traces the parallels between these concepts in Russian psychology of perception and the concepts of regulation of perception activity existing in European and American cognitive neuropsychology and modern neuroscience, such as ascending and descending processes in visual information processing and the hypothesis of predictive coding. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for empirically testing the models of perception and visual attention based on N.A. Bernstein’s ideas using modern methods of cognitive science. M. Falikman’s research was supported by the NRU HSE Fundamental Research Program.