ABSTRACT
Alexander Luria's studies in mental retardation can best be understood and appreciated within the context of his whole life's work. During a career that spanned over 50 years, Luria devoted himself to the study of higher mental processes in human beings. He examined the development of cognitive functioning in nonhandicapped and intellectually handicapped children, the development of writing and voluntary movements, disturbances of intellectual capacities in patients with brain lesions, eye-movement mechanisms, mnemonic disorders, and variations in thinking across different cultures. As broad and varied as was the scope of Luria's work, his thinking in all of these areas was unified under a single conceptual framework, which derived from his collaboration with Lev S. Vygotsky in the 1920s and 30s. This framework inspired the goals, hypotheses, and methodology of most of Luria's lifetime research, including his studies in mental retardation (Luria, 1979).
