Tools to Study Behavior and Activity: Psychologists’ Inventions as a Component of Cultural-Historical Process

Abstract

Specially designed cultural tools of psychologists’ and ethologists’ research activity are considered. The tools are objects stimulating a living being (an animal or a human) to unfold its behavior (activity) and, due to it, providing opportunity to study the behavior (activity). They serve as a base for psychological science and are included in systems of relationships between many people. A history of inventions of these objects (from behaviorists’ puzzle boxes, gestalt psychologists’ instruments and experimental objects designed in A.N. Leontiev’s activity approach to the newest objects) is a part of intellectual history of humankind and unfolding of its creative potential towards self-development and self-cognition. Some part of the objects become, in a transformed form, objects of mass culture (e.g. toys). These inventions by psychologists and ethologists are a component of cultural-historical process and modern humankind’s activity structures.