Contribution of T. P. Zinchenko to the Development of Cognitive and Applied Psychology (On the Occasion of Her 85th Birthday)

This article is a scientific-biographical essay dedicated to the analysis of the activities, human, and personal qualities of the renowned Soviet psychologist, cognitive scientist, representative of the Leningrad/Saint Petersburg school of psychology, Doctor of Psychological Sciences, Professor Tatyana Petrovna Zinchenko. The article highlights her extraordinary personal and human qualities and her pronounced pedagogical talent. It demonstrates her pioneering and foundational role in the creation and development of the theoretical-methodological and experimental basis of the Leningrad school of cognitive psychology, research on memory, perception, recognition, human information encoding, studies of perceptual interference processes, cognitive styles, and applied aspects of engineering psychology and cognitive ergonomics. Research on this range of issues began and was conducted in the 1960s–1980s in the “Reception and Processing of Information” laboratory of the Faculty of Psychology at Leningrad State University. Under T.P. Zinchenko’s leadership, methods of tachistoscopic research were developed and widely used in educational and scientific-practical work, showing high effectiveness in the study of perception, attention, and memory processes. Tatyana Petrovna developed a structural-functional model of recognition, investigating its structure and connections with basic mental processes. Together with A.A. Frumkin in the mid-1990s, the first automated system of psychological support for activities was created and implemented in practice, including a battery of psychodiagnostics methods for professional selection based on computer technologies.