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p.7 Like tool systems, sign systems (language, writing, number systems) are created by societies over the course of human history and change with the form of society and the level of its cultural development. Vygotsky believed that the internalization of culturally produced sign systems brings about behavioral transformations and forms the bridge between early and later forms of individual development.
p.8 In order to create such an enabling theory-method in the generally accepted scientific manner, it is necessary to discover the essence of the given area of phenomena, the laws according to which they change, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, their causes. It is necessary to formulate the categories and concepts that are specifically relevant to them - in other words, to create one's own Capital.
p.28 Initially speech follows actions, is provoked by and dominated by activity. At a later stage, however, when speech is moved to the starting point of an activity, a new relation between word and action emerges. Now speech guides, determines, and dominates the course of action
p.31 The entire process of problem solving is essentially determined by perception.
p.33-34 We requested four- and five-year old children to press one of five keys on a keyboard as they identified each one of a series of picture stimuli assigned to each key... Perhaps the most remarkable result is that the entire process of selection by the child is external, and concentrated in the motor sphere... The child does her selecting while carrying out whatever movements the choice requires... The child's choice resembles a somewhat delayed selection among his own movements. Vascillations in perception are directly reflected in the structure of the movement... The main difference between the choice processes in the child and in the adult is that for the child the series of tentative movements constitute the selection process... the child resolves her choice not through a direct process of visual perception but through movement, hesitating between two stimuli... When the child transfers her attention to a new location, thereby creating a new focus in the dynamic structure of perception, her hand obediently moves toward this new center, in unison with the eye. In short, movement is not separated from perception: the processes coincide almost exactly.
p.35 When the child attends to the auxiliary sign in order to find the key corresponding to the given stimulus, he no longer exhibits those motor impulses that arise directly from perception... The use of auxiliary signs breaks up the fusion of the sensory field and the motor system and thus makes new kinds of behavior possible... The system of signs restructures the whole psychological process and enables the child to master her movement. It reconstructs the choice process on a totally new basis. Movement detaches itself from direct perception and comes under the control of sign functions included in the choice response.
p.35 Beginning with Kohler, scholars have noted that the ability or inability to direct one's attention is an essential determinant of the success or failure of any practical operation.
p.37 Because he is able to form quasi-needs, the child is capable of breaking the operation into its separate parts, each of which becomes an independent problem that he formulates for himself with the help of speech.
p.57 Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.
p.93 play seems to be invented at the point when the child begins to experience unrealizable tendencies... To resolve this tension, the preschool child enters an imaginary, illusory world in which the unrealizable desires can be realized, and this world is what we call play.
p.93 imagination in adolescents and school children is play without action.
p.97 In play thought is separated from objects and action arises from ideas rather than from things... Action... begins to be determined by ideas and not by objects themselves.
p.99 Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse... the essential attribute of play is a rule that has become a desire.
p.101 play gives a child a new form of desires ... a child's greatest achievements are possible in play
p.101 In play, an action replaces another action just as an object replaces another object... movement in the field of meaning predominates in play.
p.103 The child moves forward essentially through play activity. Only in this sense can play be considered a leading activity that determines the child's development.
p.103 In one sense a child at play is free to determine his own actions. But in another sense this is an illusory freedom, for his actions are in fact subordinated to the meanings of things, and he acts accordingly.
p.128 Though Vygotsky focused much of his research energies on the study of children, to view this great Russian psychologist as primarily a student of child development would be an error; he emphasized the study of development because he believed it to be the primary theoretical and methodological means necessary to unravel complex human processes, a view of human psychology that distinguishes him from his and our contemporaries. There was, for him, no real distinction between developmental psychology and basic psychological inquiry.
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