A study of the prerequisites for the development of eye-mindedness of children with intellectual disabilities

The article presents the results of an experimental study of the prerequisites for the development of eye-mindedness among primary school students with mental retardation. The prerequisites for the development of this type of thinking are considered to be the children’s ability to mentally split and rotate the image, as well as agglutinate its parts. The ascertaining experiment is aimed at revealing the specifics of eye-mindedness of mentally retarded children by means of the author's specially created methodology, which includes three sets of tasks. The subjects of the experiment performed tasks that demonstrated their ability to think at the figurative level (mentally rotate and split the perceived image and combine its elements). The obtained experimental data testify to pronounced disorders in the development of eye-mindedness of younger schoolchildren with mental retardation. The psychological analysis of both the deficiencies and the success of the students’ performance of experimental tasks on the basis of figurative thinking opens up a perspective in determining the methodological conditions for optimizing the process of teaching children with mental retardation.