6.1. General characteristics of the mental activity of animals

The evolution of mental activity is an integral part of the evolution of the animal world and occurs according to the laws determined by this process. With an increase in the level of organization of animals, their interaction with the outside world becomes more complex, there is a need for more intensive contacts with an increasing number of subject components of the environment, as well as to improve the maneuvering between these components and the active handling of them. Only in this case, the balance between the increasing consumption of vital components of the environment and the level of organization of the body is restored, and the more successful avoidance of dangers and unpleasant or harmful effects is realized. But the process is extremely complex and lengthy, it requires improving the orientation in time and space, which is achieved primarily by the progress of mental reflection.

We can assume that it was precisely the various forms of movement that became the decisive factor in the evolution of the psyche. At the same time, there is an inverse relationship: without progressive development of the psyche, the motor activity of organisms cannot be improved, biologically adequate motor responses cannot be carried out, and the further evolutionary development of the organism slows down. The mental reflection itself does not remain unchanged in the process of evolution, but undergoes profound qualitative transformations. Initially, primitive mental reflection provided only a departure from adverse conditions. Then came the search for conditions favorable to the body, not perceived directly. Such a search is currently a permanent component of developed instinctive behavior.

At higher levels of development, when objective perception already exists, and the sensory actions of animals ensure the development of images, mental reflection is able to fully orient and regulate the behavior of animals. First of all, the reflection is necessary for the animal to overcome various kinds of obstacles, which is necessary for the emergence of labile forms of individual behavior in changing environmental conditions: in most animals, skills, and in highly developed animals, intelligence. The most profound qualitative changes in the psyche during the evolutionary process helped to single out several stages of evolutionary development. The clearest line lies between the sensory and perceptual psyche.

According to the definition of the Russian zoopsychologist A.N. Leontiev, the elementary sensory psyche is the stage at which animal activity “responds to one or another individual affecting property (or a combination of individual properties) due to the essential connection of this property with those influences on which the implementation of the main biological functions of animals. Accordingly, the reflection of reality associated with this structure of activity has the form of sensitivity to individual influencing properties (or a combination of properties), the form of an elementary sensation. ” ^[27]

Perceptual psyche, by definition, A.N. Leontiev, "is characterized by the ability to reflect external objective reality no longer in the form of individual elementary sensations caused by individual properties or their combination, but in the form of reflection of things." ^[28]

Within the elementary sensory psyche, as well as within the perceptual psyche, one can distinguish significantly different levels of mental development: lower and higher, as well as, according to a number of scientists, some intermediate levels. Within large taxa there are always animals standing at different stages of mental development, and all the qualities of a higher mental level are always laid at the previous, lower level.

It should be remembered that the innate and acquired behavior does not replace each other on the ladder of evolution, but develop together as two components of a single process. There is not a single animal whose skills completely replace all instincts. Progressive development of precisely instinctive, genetically fixed behavior corresponds to progress in the field of individually variable behavior. Instinctive behavior reaches the greatest difficulty just in higher animals, and this progress entails the development and complication of forms of learning.