The article provides an overview of modern works devoted to the study of cognitive predictors of academic success. The general patterns of forecasting are revealed: the most powerful and universal predictor of academic success at different stages of school education is psychometric intelligence; creativity is less significant and rather unstable. It is argued that these patterns are poorly traced at the level of preschool education. Particular cognitive functions are significant for predicting the future educational achievements of preschoolers: information processing speed, visual perception (in combination with motor functions), short-term memory, and attention. Spatial abilities have a certain prognostic potential, though reasoning in preschoolers is not a strong predictor of academic success; executive functions have the greatest predictive power. It is noted that the general patterns in predicting the academic success of students can be traced in elementary school: the predictive potentials of psychometric intelligence are revealed, the power of individual cognitive abilities (in particular, spatial abilities) increases, the contribution of executive functions to the prediction decreases. The general tendency for non-cognitive factors (educational motivation, some personality traits) to increase with age also begins to appear in elementary school.

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The article presents the author’s attempt to apply the ideas of Lev S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology to the analysis of the nature of religious consciousness. Cultural-historical psychology is offered as an adequate alternative to such fields as cognitive religious studies and evolutionary psychology of religion, because it does not ignore and does not reduce the social and cultural determinants of mental development. Based on the ideas of Lev S. Vygotsky and his studies of magical thinking and semiotic mediation of mental functions, the author from the psychological point of view considers religion as a special system of historically formed cultural (semiotic) means that contribute to mastering one’s own mental functions and behavior. It is suggested that these semiotic tools be referred to as religious or supernatural mental tools. The following groups of these tools are distinguished: 1) religious objects (natural or artificial); 2) religious actions (rituals); 3) religious images (objectified or subjective); 4) religious meanings (concepts). The nature of religious consciousness viewed through the lens of cultural-historical psychology by Lev S. Vygotsky is revealed by the author in a number of provisions: religious consciousness is a mental functional system resulting from the process of assimilation, mainly verbal semiotic means of a particular religious tradition; religious consciousness is constituted as dynamic systems of meaning that integrate the believer’s intellectual and affective processes; religious consciousness is social in origin and is formed in activity; semiotic mediation of mental functions and human behavior is the mechanism to form religious consciousness. Further work on the application of Lev S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology to the analysis of religious consciousness must include the development of experimental research methodology, the advancement of experimental hypotheses, and the consideration from the perspective of this approach of explanatory models and facts obtained in other approaches – cognitive religious studies and evolutionary psychology of religion.

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