The Soviet psychologist Alexandr Romanovich Luria is best known for his work in neuropsychology but also contributed to developmental and crosscultural psychology. The son of a prominent physician, Luria graduated from the University of Kazan in 1921 and joined the staff of the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1923. He tempered his early interest in psychoanalysis with a growing awareness of the need for objective methods. His attempts to study the unconscious by objective methods resulted in the book The Nature of Human Conflicts (1932). In 1924 Luria met Lev Vigotsky, and their subsequent collaboration—until Vigotsky's premature death in 1934—had a lifelong influence on Luria's work. Together they developed the concept of historicocultural psychology, advancing the thesis that higher cognitive functions result from the internalization of external cultural devices and codes.

Vigotsky and Luria embarked on two lines of research driven by the historicocultural theory...