A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal Disease Campaigns
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Studies of Cerebral Function in Learning, Vol. 7: The Relation Between Cerebral Mass, Learning, and Retention (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Studies of Cerebral Function in Learning, Vo...)
Excerpt from Studies of Cerebral Function in Learning, Vol. 7: The Relation Between Cerebral Mass, Learning, and Retention
Group D. At necropsy it was found that the thalamus had been injured in some cases. These were excluded from the major groups, but since the results with them have some bearing on the problem they are given separately.
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Constructing Scientific Psychology: Karl Lashley's Mind-Brain Debates (Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology)
(Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scal...)
Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between "mind" and "brain" and the relative roles of "nature" and "nurture" in shaping behavior and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, "pure" science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.
Karl Spencer Lashley was a psychologist and behaviorist remembered for his contributions to the study of learning and memory.
Background
He was born on 7 June 1890, in Davis, West Virginia, United States. He was the only child of Charles and Maggie Lashley. He grew up in a middle-class family with a reasonably comfortable life. Lashley's father had a love of local politics and held various political positions. On the other hand, his mother was a stay at home mom and had a vast collection of books in the home.
Education
His mother would have women from the community come in and she would teach them various subjects He graduated high school at age 14. He enrolled at West Virginia University, where he had originally decided to become an English major. He took a course in zoology, however, and decided to switch his major to zoology due to his interactions with a professor. After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts at the West Virginia University, he was awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh where he taught biology along with biological laboratories. While there he also carried out research which he used for his master's thesis. Once Lashley completed his master's degree, he studied at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Ph. D. degree in zoology in 1914.
Career
After early positions at Johns Hopkins and at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D. C. , he worked at the University of Minnesota (1917 - 1924), the Behavior Research Fund in Chicago (1926 - 1929), and the University of Chicago (1929 - 1935). In 1935 he accepted an appointment at Harvard University, where he remained until 1955.
His experimental results were published in 1929 under the title Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence. At that time the cortex of the brain was seen as consisting of separate but connected areas, each with a specific function. Psychological processes, such as conditioning, were thought to be dependent on localized structures. Lashley’s mature work involved the ablation, or destruction, of different areas of the rat’s cerebral cortex and the assessment of its effect on the rat’s behavior. When Lashley destroyed a particular portion of cortex in an experimental animal, another portion would perform the function of the destroyed area. The concept of equipotentiality referred to this capacity of the remaining cortex to compensate for the loss.
He devised ingenious methods for testing the rats’ abilities to thread a maze, solve a puzzle box, and discriminate between different patterns, before and after ablation.
The principles of equipotentiality and mass action that Lashley derived from his experimental work emphasized the dynamic functioning of the cortex and were opposed to the theory that memories, thoughts, or abilities were localized in discrete cells.
Lashley’s emphasis on dynamic functioning was also, according to Weidman, correlated with his innatist stance. Lashley’s hereditarianism and interest in elucidating the biological bases of behavior brought him into conflict with two important traditions in twentieth-century American biology and psychology.
His career was shaped by his debates with representatives of these two traditions, psychobiology and behaviorism.
For Herrick, consciousness and free will were emergent properties of the nervous system that could never be fully explained by physics and chemistry.
Sharon Kingsland explores the assumptions of Herrick’s science in “A Humanistic Science: Charles Judson Herrick and the Struggle for Psychobiology at the University of Chicago” (1993).
Both Hull and Lashley claimed the mantle of mechanistic, deterministic psychology but disagreed on what that meant.
Bruce criticizes Weidman’s interpretation of the debate in this article in “The Lashley-Hull Debate Revisited” (1998).
Weidman argues that Lashley’s neutral stance and avowed opposition to psychological theorizing were themselves political statements and that Lashley’s concept of brain function and his lifelong hereditarianism were correlated with his views on race and on the social order.
Views
Lashley dismissed Herrick’s emergentism as mystical, arguing for the reduction of consciousness to the physico-chemical workings of the nervous system and against the notion of progress in evolution that underlay Herrick’s theory. “Psychobiology, Progressivism, and the Anti-Progressive Tradition. ”
Membership
Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1951)
Personality
He was a pure, disinterested scientist whose work was devoid of social or political meaning.