Aleksandr R. Luria

Alexander Luria was born in Kazan, an old Russian University town east of Moscow. He entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his degree in 1921 at the age of 19. While still a student, he established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association and planned on a career in psychology. His earliest research sought to establish objective methods for assessing Freudian ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effects of fatigue on mental processes.

In 1923 his use of reaction time measures to study thought processes in the context of work settings won him a position at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow, where he developed a psychodiagnostic procedure he referred to as the "combined motor method" for diagnosing individual subjects' thought processes. In this method (described in detail in Luria, 1932), subjects are asked to carry out three tasks simultaneously. 

One hand is to be held steady while the other is used to press a key or squeeze a rubber bulb in response to verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter, to which the subject is asked to respond verbally with the first word to come to mind. Preliminary trials are presented until a steady baseline of coordination is established. At this point, "critical" stimuli which the experimenter believes to be related to specific thoughts in the subject, are presented. 

Evidence for the ability to "read the subject's mind" is the selective disruption of the previously established coordinated system by the critical test stimuli. This method was applied to various naturally occurring and experimentally induced cases, providing a model system for psycho-diagnosis that won widespread attention in the west when it was published. The book describing these studies was published in Russian only in 2002, owing to its association with psychoanalytic theorizing, which was disapproved of by Soviet authorities.

In 1924 Luria met Lev Semionovich Vygotsky, whose influence was decisive in shaping his future career. Together with Vygotsky and Alexei Nikolaivitch Leontiev, Luria sought to establish an approach to psychology that would enable them to "discover the way natural processes such as physical maturation and sensory mechanisms become intertwined with culturally determined processes to produce the psychological functions of adults" (Luria, 1979, p. 43). 

Vygotsky and his colleagues referred to this new approach variably as "cultural," "historical," and "instrumental" psychology. These three labels all index the centrality of cultural mediation in the constitution of specifically human psychological processes and the role of the social environment in structuring the processes by which children appropriate the cultural tools of their society in the process of ontogeny. 

An especially heavy emphasis was placed on the role of language, the "tool of tools" in this process: the acquisition of language was seen as the pivotal moment when phylogeny and cultural history are merged to form specifically human forms of thought, feeling, and action.