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This essay discusses the brief but extensive correspondence Soviet neuro-psychologist Alexander Luria exchanged with his younger American colleague Oliver Sacks between 1973 and 1977, the year Luria died. Sacks, whose case histories went on to become mainstream bestsellers, always expressed his indebtedness to Luria, whose warm and detailed approach to writing about his patients' peculiar and sometimes distressing neurological conditions inspired Sacks. This essay explores this influence but also probes distinctions between the two scientists' understandings of human consciousness tied to the very different social and political contexts in which they conducted their clinical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of assessing executive functions through behavioral observation scales is still under theoretical and empirical construction. This article reports on the analysis of the factorial structure of the EOCL-1 scale that assesses executive functions, as proposed by the theory developed by Luria, which has not been previously considered in this type of evaluation. In this scale, the executive functions taken into account are error correction, internal behavioral and cognition regulatory language, limbic system conscious regulation, decision making, future consideration of consequences of actions, goal-directed behavior, inhibitory control of automatic responses, creation of new behavioral repertoires, and cognitive–behavioral activity verification. A variety of validity and reliability analyses were carried out, with the following results: (a) an adequate internal consistency level of executive functions between α = 0.70 and α = 0.83, (b) significant convergent validity with a scale that assesses frontal deficits between r = −0.07 and r = 0.28, and (c) the scale’s construct validity that proposes a model with an executive central factor comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.93, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.04 (LO.04 and HI.04), standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.04, and x2(312) = 789.29, p = 0.001. The findings are discussed based on previous literature reports and in terms of the benefits of using a scale to assess the proposed executive functions.

The process of assessing executive functions through behavioral observation scales is still under theoretical and empirical construction. This article reports on the analysis of the factorial structure of the EOCL-1 scale that assesses executive functions, as proposed by the theory developed by Luria, which has not been previously considered in this type of evaluation. In this scale, the executive functions taken into account are error correction, internal behavioral and cognition regulatory language, limbic system conscious regulation, decision making, future consideration of consequences of actions, goal-directed behavior, inhibitory control of automatic responses, creation of new behavioral repertoires, and cognitive–behavioral activity verification. A variety of validity and reliability analyses were carried out, with the following results: (a) an adequate internal consistency level of executive functions between α = 0.70 and α = 0.83, (b) significant convergent validity with a scale that assesses frontal deficits between r = −0.07 and r = 0.28, and (c) the scale's construct validity that proposes a model with an executive central factor comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.93, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.04 (LO.04 and HI.04), standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) = 0.04, and x2(312) = 789.29, p = 0.001. The findings are discussed based on previous literature reports and in terms of the benefits of using a scale to assess the proposed executive functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the ideas and tuning points of M. Cole's career — the famous American psychologist, his theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to modern psychology. It is composed of three sections. The first one considers Cole—Luria's cooperation for many years: scientific as well as personal interactions in the process of acquiring Cultural-Historical Psychology of Russia. It summarizes the outcomes and methodological problems of interdisciplinary cross-cultural studies that M. Cole and his colleagues conducted in Africa and on the Yucatan Peninsula. The second one outlines M. Cole's important role as an international mediator in Soviet and post-Soviet psychology that revealed both through his own studies and his translations of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria's works in English or their editing. Plus his occupations with “Soviet psychology” (later — “Journal of Russian and East European Psychology”). The third section briefly evaluates Cole's theoretical efforts on the integration of Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev's ideas as much as recasting them in the context of modern trends in Cultural psychology. Significant place is given to a context-activity approach developed by M. Cole in Cultural in the framework of integrated "Cultural-Historical Activity theory". The erroneous labeling of the context-activity approach as an anti-historical one is discussed. The authors come to the conclusion that M. Cole's context-activity approach is not far remote from Cultural-Historical Psychology but complements its development with new concepts, methods and points of growth.

Alexander Luria played a prominent role in the psychoanalytic community that flourished briefly in Soviet Russia in the decade following the 1917 October Revolution. In 1925 he co-wrote an introduction to Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle with Lev Vygotsky, which argued that the conservatism of the instincts that Freud described might be overcome through the kind of radical social transformation then taking place in Russia. In attempting to bypass the backward looking aspects of Freud's theory, however, Luria and Vygotsky also did away with the tension between Eros and the death drive; precisely the element of Freud's essay they praised for being 'dialectical'. This article theoretically unpicks Luria and Vygotsky's critique of psychoanalysis. It concludes by considering their optimistic ideological argument against the death drive with Luria's contemporaneous psychological research findings, proposing that Freud's ostensibly conservative theory may not have been as antithetical to revolutionary goals as Luria and Vygotsky assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) is well-known among contemporary psychologists and educators. The cult of Vygotsky, also known as 'Vygotsky boom', is probably conducive to continuous reinterpretation and wide dissemination of his ideas, but hardly beneficial for their understanding as an integrative theory of human cultural and biosocial development. Two problems are particularly notable. These are, first, numerous gaps and age-old biases and misconceptions in the historiography of Soviet psychology, and, second, the tendency to overly focus on the figure of Vygotsky to the neglect of the scientific activities of a number of other protagonists of the history of cultural-historical psychology. This study addresses these two problems and reconstructs the history and group dynamics within the dense network of Vygotsky's collaborators and associates, and overviews their research, which is instrumental in understanding Vygotsky's integrative theory in its entirety as a complex of interdependent ideas, methods, and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Luria's model of the working brain consisting of three functional units was formulated through the examination of hundreds of focal brain-injury patients. Several psychometric instruments based on Luria's syndrome analysis and accompanying qualitative tasks have been developed since the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, JP Das and colleagues defined a specific cognitive processes model based directly on Luria's two coding units termed simultaneous and successive by studying diverse cross-cultural, ability, and socioeconomic strata. The cognitive assessment system is based on the PASS model of cognitive processes and consists of four composite scales of Planning-Attention-Simultaneous-Successive (PASS) devised by Naglieri and Das in 1997. Das and colleagues developed the two new scales of planning and attention to more closely model Luria's theory of higher cortical functions. In this paper a theoretical review of Luria's theory, Das and colleagues elaboration of Luria's model, and the neural correlates of PASS composite scales based on extant studies is summarized. A brief empirical study of the neuropsychological specificity of the PASS composite scales in a sample of 33 focal cortical stroke patients using cluster analysis is then discussed. Planning and simultaneous were sensitive to right hemisphere lesions. These findings were integrated with recent functional neuroimaging studies of PASS scales. In sum it was found that simultaneous is strongly dependent on dual bilateral occipitoparietal interhemispheric coordination whereas successive demonstrated left frontotemporal specificity with some evidence of interhemispheric coordination across the prefrontal cortex. Hence, support for the validity of the PASS composite scales was found as well as for the axiom of the independence of code content from code type originally specified in 1994 by Das, Naglieri, and Kirby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reflect on the Russian scholar Alexander Luria's career as a neuropsychologist in special education. They discuss Luria's views on the lack of understanding on mental retardation who considers it as a defect that starts during a person's development. They also tackle the relationship between the theory and practice of special education and brain research.

Almost 70 years ago, Alexander Luria incorporated semantic aphasia among his aphasia classifications by demonstrating that deficits in linking the logical relationships of words in a sentence could co-occur with non-linguistic disorders of calculation, spatial gnosis and praxis deficits. In line with his comprehensive approach to the assessment of language and other cognitive functions, he argued that deficits in understanding semantically reversible sentences and prepositional phrases, for example, were in line with a single neuropsychological factor of impaired spatial analysis and synthesis, since understanding such grammatical relationships would also draw on their spatial relationships. Critically, Luria demonstrated the neural underpinnings of this syndrome with the critical implication of the cortex of the left temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) junction. In this study, we report neuropsychological and lesion profiles of 10 new cases of semantic aphasia. Modern neuroimaging techniques provide support for the relevance of the left TPO area for semantic aphasia, but also extend Luria's neuroanatomical model by taking into account white matter pathways. Our findings suggest that tracts with parietal connectivity - the arcuate fasciculus (long and posterior segments), the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, the superior longitudinal fasciculus II and III, and the corpus callosum - are implicated in the linguistic and non-linguistic deficits of patients with semantic aphasia., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)