(Pre-)imagination questions...

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I found this short piece to be a bit hard to follow.  The four stages of the child's cultural development make sense, but how LV got there made me scratch my head a bit.  As we read last week, memory (which has a strong connection with language) is an essential component of the associative and dissociative processes of imagination.

One of the things I thought about as I read was how the two forms of development  (cultural and natural/ biological) are related to imagination and its development.  I know that (as Vygotsky points out) imagination is cultural in nature and is a product of accumulated experiences, but to what extent are elements of the earliest forms of the development of the imagination related to "the process of the general organic growth of the child?" Perhaps they aren't related at all, but it seems that the minds of babies could begin associating and dissociating images, feelings, and even blurry faces prior to the development of language.

Obviously both accumulated experience and  "the mastering of new cultural methods of behavior" have a profound influence on the development of the imagination, and the power of reasoning must play an essential role in the association and dissociation central to the imaginative process, but to what extent do natural mental functions play a role in imagination? How does the imagination function prior to the development of these later psychological functions?  Is the imagination more chaotic (in terms of association and dissociation) and comprised of random images during the phase of infancy (or generally speaking prior to language acquisition/ prolonged language exposure/ the development of reasoning)?  Perhaps I should go back and read the chapter on primitive man to find answers, but babies still lack the accumulated experiences and some of the reasoning skills that primitive humans end up having, so I feel there is more to this than could be answered by that text.

I guess the ultimate question that I would like to explore further as time permits is are there aspects of, or psychological functions relating to, the imagination that are natural?  Perhaps this relates to Vygotsky's point in this chapter that "the organic maturation plays the part of a condition rather than a motive power of the process of cultural development [in this case of the imagination], since the structure of that process is defined by outward influences."  That is to say, before the development of the imagination is conditioned by outward influences what component parts exist and how do they function?

I'm not really sure if or how these later questions in this post could be answered with basic research, but would love to discuss and explore further as time permits.  I feel like it would be hard to accurately capture how the imagination (or perhaps pre-imagination) of a very young child functions.  Does anyone know of any extant literature to which I could turn to find more answers?

P.S. My roommate was just telling my about research on the visual cliff, which shows that the imagination infants is active in some capacity.  Babies can at the very least use their imaginations to predict the future.  In his words, "they aren't just little body bags."

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