ABSTRACT
Alexandr Romanovich Luria's work on the quantitative measures of subconscious responses has a ring of modernity to it in light of the current interest in implicit knowledge and memory. In the 1920s, Luria began to work closely with Vygotsky. Although they were only 6 years apart, Luria always considered Vygotsky his mentor, and credited him with much of his own subsequent ideas and approaches, sometimes to the point of self-deprecation. In the area of cross-cultural studies, Luria launched an expedition to remote parts of Central Asia to study the effects of literacy and social change on the types of inference used by the natives. Vygotsky and Luria turned to the studies of brain-damaged populations, notably aphasics, to test some of their basic hypotheses concerning the relationship between language and thought. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
