ABSTRACT
Professor Sokolov's work is known to most American psychologists, and represents an important legacy of the influence of Russian psychology on American science. One of his books, Perception and the Conditioned Reflex helped develop several areas of psychology. The book introduced to American psychologists the concepts of orienting and defensive responses. It provided the theoretical stimulus for much of American psychophysiology during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, interest in Sokolov's template model, explaining habituation as a matching of stimulus features on both neuronal and subjective levels, stimulated the rapid growth of cognitive sciences. In the specialized area of cognitive development, the Sokolovian principles of habituation evolved into the 'habituation' paradigm to evaluate visual memory in preverbal infants. Applications of 'Sokolovian' orienting and habituation even influenced polygraphy, and the concepts created a theoretical basis to refine polygraph examinations from subjective judgments to the quasi-experimental procedures associated with the guilty knowledge and control question tests.
