The article briefly analyzes the life path in science and the professional activities of the prominent educational psychologist N. V. Kuzmina. She is the founder of such an innovative field of human science as acmeology for the development of professionalism of adult specialists. She implemented this innovative discipline based on the study of the work of such main subjects of the education system as a kindergarten teacher, a school teacher, a master of industrial training, a teacher and a university dean. The article is the first to analyze, from the standpoint of subject-activity and institutional-personological approaches, the outstanding role of N. V. Kuzmina in studying the development of abilities, pedagogical talent and talent of teachers in the education system. The decisive creative contribution of N.V. Kuzmina and her scientific school to the creation of the foundations and development of acmeology technologies in modern human science is shown.

The article analyzes the scientific and organizational activity of one of the leading specialists in this field, Honorary Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chairman of the Moscow Branch of the Russian Psychological Society (RPO) D. B. Bogoyavlenskaya against the background of the evolution of the study of thinking, abilities, giftedness, creativity in Russian human studies. The relevance of the article is determined by the need to study the history of the Russian psychology of creativity and determine the contribution to its development of D. B. Bogoyavlenskaya with the participants of the scientific school of diagnostics of abilities and development of giftedness and creativity created by her. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time in the institutional and personological plan, the periodization of D. B. Bogoyavlenskaya’s life creation was constructed and a system—holistic analysis of the logic of the development of her cognitive research and scientific and social activities was carried out according to the 30-year leadership of the Moscow Branch of the RPO, the Laboratory of Psychodiagnostics of Creative Abilities of the Psychological Institute of RAO and Inter.

The problem of revealing creative giftedness is considered in the context of the problem of training and professional realization of a teacher. The importance and interconnection of two processes is emphasized: the disclosure of the student’s creative gifts and the process of selfdevelopment of the teacher’s creative abilities.

The article presents the results of a study of the cognitive activity of two samples of children of senior preschool age, with a difference of 20 years. Using the “Creative field” method, significant differences in the characteristics of mental activity and motivation of the studied groups were revealed in the direction of their decrease in the group of modern preschoolers. At the same time, the data obtained on intelligence, measured by the J. Raven test, indicate that modern preschoolers coped with tasks on this test a little better than their peers 20 years ago. An analysis of the current situation of child development is given.

The article suggests that the basis of artistic giftedness, its main predictor is the presence of the individual artistic world of the creator of the work of art, which he carries in himself as an internal form of his creations, in which it materializes in the form of an external one. This artistic world is an expression of the integrity of artistic thinking and its realization, content and form. The art world is not a frozen education, but a dynamic one. Its changes are associated with many factors: with the place of residence, lifestyle, worldview and world-feeling, education, “school”, work, events — historical, social, personal life. In the article, the author proposes the systematization of the author’s artistic worlds: 1) according to the level of reality prevailing in the creative work of the creator; 2) according to the figurative composition; 3) according to the degree of proximity to the realities of life.