Background. In modern psychology the study of mechanisms of creative thinking is of great interest. Attention is one of the important factors affecting the operation of intuitive thinking component.

The Objective of the paper is to study the effect of anticipatory attention on the insight and analytical frequency in solving anagrams.

Design. During the experiment, the participants performed two successive tasks. The first task included stimuli identification when the subjects were presented with stimuli — anagrams and pseudowords. The task was to identify the anagram correctly. In the second task (if the stimulus had been the anagram), the participants had to solve the anagram, noting whether the solution was analytical or an insight. The anagram and pseudoword had different letter order. The participants were divided into two groups: the experimental group whose subjects were informed about the difference and were asked to use it for a lexical solution and the control group whose subjects were not informed about the difference.

It was expected that the identification of the anagram in the first task will shape anticipatory attention patterns for the experimental group, which will affect the frequency of insight solutions in the second task. Results. The subjects of the experimental group were found to have a correlation relationship between the speed characteristics of the first and second tasks for analytical solutions. For insight solutions, no such connection was found.

Conclusion. The results demonstrate that insights and analytical solutions are the result of two separate processes of finding solutions that proceed in parallel.

Background. The paper considers the issue of categorical search for three-dimensional geometric shapes. The results of the previous studies on the real-world objects showed that pre-attentive extrafoveal analysis provides an effective identification of the target, reflecting in the right direction of the first saccade compared with the random search.

Objective. In this study, we investigated the efficacy of extrafoveal analysis during categorical search for pyramids in two groups of participants: mathematicians and psychologists.

Design. 15 mathematicians and 17 psychologists aged 18-25 participated in the study. Each participant performed 144 trialssearching for the target pyramid among the distractor pyramids. In the series 2and 9, any eye movements were prohibited to study covert attention.

Results. The findings of the experiment failed to reveal any differences in the use of extrafoveal analysis and accuracy in both groups. We observed dramatic individual differences, revealed in various degrees of extrafoveal analysis in the search process and in changing the strategy of the task solving. Special series which prohibited eye movements, demonstrated a significant role of covert attention in the categorical search, as well as the possibility and effectiveness of extrafoveal analysis even though while free instruction it could not be used by all participants and all cases.

Conclusion. During categorical search both foveal and extrafoveal processing of stimuli, as well as pre-attentive analysis and covert attention, were simultaneously involved. The dynamics of their interaction was determined by low-level perceptual processes, individual characteristics of the subjects, the task specificity and the instruction.

Background. Recently, scientific and technological progress allows the widespread use of high-tech electronic means to create security systems. The advantages of identifying people who are high on drugs or alcohol with video surveillance systems on pupillograms are indisputable. However, those who bear aggressive intentions stay in the shade. The standard method of identifying emotions aimed at recording facial expressions is sufficient enough, but it is difficult to recognize negative intentions in a person if they keep control of themselves. To solve this problem, we propose to switch from passive safety systems to active ones. Therefore, studies of the pupillary response to the stimuli presented are relevant today.

The Objective of the research is to identify patterns of pupillograms that can be used to control pupillary reactions to the stimuli significant for an individual. Simultaneously, the following tasks were solved: checking the possibility of interpreting the pupillogram by synchronizing them with the tracks of the attention focus and searching for the sites of the pupillograms allegedly resulting from emotions in response to the presented stimuli.

Design. At the first stage, the images used as stimuli presented to the subjects of the research were selected. Incentives were thematic in nature and contributed to identifying the unstable psychophysical state of a person or their susceptibility to aggression. At the second stage, the calibration of the optoelectronic system used to record the pupillograms and oculograms, as well as stabilizing factors that affect the size of the pupils, was carried out. Pupilograms were obtained using groups of two age categories (16–25 years old and 45–50 years old) of 10 and 5 subjects accordingly (both males and females). The subjects selected for the research did not have any eye diseases; their eye sight was normal or adjusted.

Results.The interdependence of the size of the pupils and the displacement of the center of attention were identified. The verification of the pupillogram rank correlation was obtained when different subjects viewed identical sequences of visual stimuli showed that in general the p significance level did not exceed the critical value alpha = 0.05. The reliability of the correlation confirms the pupillograms depend on the shape of the objects viewed and the patterns that unite the pupillograms. The microsaccades in pupillograms are well explained by moving and focusing the gaze on the details of the image, which makes it possible to interpret them as waves of attention. Synchronizing the pupillograms and oculograms allows distinguishing areas that are presumably explained by the emotional reaction of the individual to a weak external stimulus. The Fourier analysis of the pupillograms revealed a change in the observed frequency spectrum, depending on the presence or absence of an emotional reaction, the speed of the shift in the focus of attention.

Findings.The observed set of frequencies suggests a connection between the diameters of the eye pupils and the brain potentials. The practical significance of the results is to expand the possibilities of using biometric security systems, including prevention of suicide in adolescents.

Working memory is a major construct in many modern cognitive theories. Defining functions of working memory are storage and processing. This paper provides a study of the problems of correspondence between these functions. It has been figured out that the main difference between these two functions is determined by the following dichotomy: independence/dependence of storage and processing. In the context of stimuli and time correlation studies, these two functions are closely related and based on sharing a common non-specific resource. Studies that analyze resource switching and also correlated and isolated functioning of working memory presuppose some independence between storage and processing. It has been mentioned that this assumption requires some specialized ‘dispatcher’, providing an optimal switching between storage and processing with respect to current contextual limits.

Empirical approaches to the study of storage-processing correspondence are analyzed. Based on this analysis, it is concluded that (1) storage and processing depend on unspecific cognitive resources, (2) storage and processing are realized independently from each other; and (3) storage and processing interact on the basis of the switching of resources via a specialized mechanism. The results can be used in the development of working memory models and for the extension of current ideas about the realization of operative storage and processing.

Virtual reality technology is used nowadays in various areas of science, and psychology, in particular. Successful work with virtual reality systems requires that a sense of presence emerges in the user, i.e. the subjective experience of the reality of being located in the artificially created environment and interacting with it. The lack of this experience or its insufficiency result in the interaction possibilities a virtual environment being unexploited. As a psychological phenomenon the sense of presence is caused by various psychological factors besides technological factors. In this paper, the reference literature review shows that the sense of presence is conditioned by demographic, cognitive, personality, and motivational variables. In particular, the sense of presence is dependent on differences in cognitive abilities and personal features, although in the last case the evidence is contradictory. The paper highlights a special role of cognitive control, i.e. metacognitive processes that are responsible for adjusting cognition to the context of the current task, thus emerging the sense of presence. The usage of expertise of psychological factors of the sense of presence in the development of virtual environments allowing effective user interaction is considered. The usage of psychological factors of the sense of presence as criteria for selecting users to operate in virtual environments is discussed. The directed research of various psychological factors that affect the sense of presence will not only support the development of general psychological theory of the sense of presence but also will allow to create effective solutions for fundamental and applied problems using virtual reality technology.