Bespalov, B.I.

Background. The concept of "professionally important quality" (PIQ) of a person, introduced in the beginning of the past century in industrial psychology, is now also used in psychology of professional sports. Modern studies of PIQ are based on an intuitive, empirical understanding of what the qualities or properties of a person are, how they arise, function and develop in sports acts, what the criteria of their importance in achieving high results in sports are. This concept of PIQ does not explain the correlation between particular qualities or their connections to indicators of success in performance. This creates the need and urgency of searching for and developing such a theory of PIQ, which would reveal their essence as well as the underlying correlations between possible psychological mechanisms of PIQ in connection with the success of sports acts.

Objective. The purpose of this study is to analyze the existing definitions of the concept of PIQ in professional activity and sports acts. The article seeks to formulate a theoretical concept of PIQ, as well as to justify the application of this concept not only to athletes, but also to other main components of sports activity (to their objects, tools, motives, goals, etc.). This goal also includes the description of the differences between the methods of constructing empirical and theoretical concepts.

Methods. When developing the theoretical concept of PIQ (as well as other concepts of the theory of acts), the method of constructing concepts "from the general to the particular" is used, which is similar to the method of "ascent from the abstract to the concrete" (Zinoviev, 2002). The concepts of "property", "quality" and PIQ are consistently built on the basis of a more general concept of "interaction" with the world, which is interpreted, as mutual influence, leading to a change in people and the world in some directions. Interaction is also considered as the main dynamic relationship between people and the world, in which social, psychological and other properties and relationships of people, including their PIQ, are generated, manifested and developed.

Results. The connection between the concepts of "property" and "interaction" is established in the article by identifying the properties of a person with the directions of the changes occurring in human interactions with the components of the world. The result of a person's change in the direction corresponding to a certain property correlates with the value of the property, which can be expressed in numbers or described in words.

When analyzing the concepts of PIQ developed in applied psychology, the following definition was formulated and justified: PIQ is the quality of the components of sports acts that is "necessary or useful" for their successful development or implementation and can be statistically significantly related to the indicators of success in the act. The concept of anti-PIQ is logically dual. This quality is "not necessary and harmful" to achieve success in mastering or performing a sports act. The proposed concept of PIQ expands the traditional idea of these qualities, which are usually correlated only with the subjects of professional acts. The article states the possibility to expand the "subject attribution" of the concept of PIQ, which contributes to more accurate and differentiated description and diagnosis. The concepts of professionally important conditions and methods of performing sports acts are considered on the example of their diagnostics on a simulator with the elements of virtual reality.

Conclusion. The main conclusion of the study is that empirical methods (correlation, etc.) of studying professionally important qualities of people can and should be supplemented by theoretical methods in studying these qualities. This will contribute to a more accurate diagnosis based on understanding of the mechanisms of their development and "binding" into individually specific systems.

Based on the ideas of E.N. Sokolov about the mechanisms of the “vector encoding” information in the brain the spherical connectionist model of visual cognitive action was constructed. This model takes into account and expressed in mathematical form some neurophysiological data on the structure and functioning of the real neural networks of the brain. In this model, using the general principles of “vector coding”, all the main stage cognitive action have been described in a mathematical form, including the step of exposing the object on the retina and the step of evaluating the correctness of the response to a stimulus. Psychophysiological problem has also been considered. The transition of the perceived object from his physiological state F at the output of pre-detectors to unconsciously perceived (psychological) state D at the output of the ensemble detectors and the model awareness of sensations of the object properties has been described. The developed spherical connectionist model of cognitive actions allowed uniting in the activity psychology the ideas of E.N. Sokolov about the “vector coding” of the object properties in the brain and the A.N. Leontiev’s ideas about the mechanisms of “active psychic reflection of the object by the subject”.

The individual characteristics of time perception by sportswomen of synchronized swimming from Russian youthful team were studied at this work. Sportswomen are greatly varied in accuracy and stability of reproduction long (2–5 sec) and estimation short (less than 250 ms) time intervals, which filled with different contents – ticks of metronome, persistent sound, pressuring the button and etc. The improvement of individual characteristics of time perception by specials methods is one of the psychological resources to increase sports achievements of the team