The Child and his Behavior. A. R. Luria

Phases of the Cultural Development of the Child

The foregoing considerations convince us that it is quite wrong to reduce the development of the child to the mere growth and maturation of innate qualities. We have already noted that in the process of his development the child is “rearmed”, and changes his most fundamental forms of adaptation to the external world. This process is manifested primarily in the replacement of immediate adaptation to the world relying on innate, “natural” capabilities, by a different and more complex stage, in which the child enters into contact with the world, not instantly, but once he has elaborated certain devices and acquired certain “cultural skills”. He begins to use all kinds of “tools” and symbols, through which he performs the tasks confronting him and does so much more successfully than before.

One would however be wrong to think that this entire process consists of nothing more than the gradual, evolutionary accumulation of complex devices and skills or the build-up of skills, and that the only difference between a 4-year old and an 8-year old is that the latter has a more fully and better developed cultural ability to make functional use of the tools of the external world and of his own behavioral processes.

By observing the child in the process of his natural development, placing him in artificial experimental conditions and “probing” in the fullest possible detail his various manifestations, we become aware of substantial qualitative differences in the behavior of children of different ages. As we have already pointed out, these differences derive not only from purely physiological changes but also from varying ability to use the various cultural forms of behavior. In other words, we may say that the child passes through certain stages of cultural development, each of which is characterized by a different attitude to the external world, by a different way of using objects and by different ways of inventing and using specific cultural devices. This is true, whether this be a system elaborated in the process of cultural development, or a device invented during the individual’s growth and adaptation.

Let us recall how the child gradually learns to walk. As soon as his muscles are strong enough, he begins to move about on the ground in the same primitive manner as animals, using a naturally innate mode of locomotion. He crawls on all fours; indeed one of the leading pedologists of our day says that the very young child reminds us of a small quadruped, rather like an “ape-like cat”. [39] That animal continues for some time to move about in the same primitive manner; within a few months, however, it begins to stand up on its legs: the child has started to walk. The transition to walking is usually not clear-cut. At first the child makes use of external objects, by holding on to them: he makes his way along holding onto the edge of the bed, an adult’s hand, a chair, pulling the chair along behind him and leaning on it. In a word, his ability to walk is not yet complete: it is in fact still surrounded, as it were, by the scaffolding of those external tools with which it was created. Within a month or two, however, the child grows out of that scaffolding, discarding it, as no more external help is needed; external tools have now been replaced by newly formed internal neurodynamic processes. Having developed strong legs, sufficient stability and coordination of movement, the child has now moved into the stage of definitive walking.

Here it is already apparent that the development of a certain function in the child passes through several phases which, as we shall see, may be scrutinized in virtually any process, from the simple to the most complicated.

Development begins with the mobilization of the most primitive innate tendencies and their actual use; it then passes through the phase of learning, when the structure of the process changes under the impact of external conditions, as what had been a natural process turns into a complex “cultural” one, and a new form of behavior is built with the help of numerous external devices; and lastly it enters the stage where these external auxiliary devices are left behind and discarded as unnecessary. On emerging from this evolution the organism is transformed and possesses new behavioral forms and devices.

Our experiments with small children have enabled us to explore this process in all its details and to identify certain fairly precise stages through which the development of the child inevitably passes.

Let us give a child a rather difficult problem to solve, such as a simple experiment with a choice reaction, requiring him, in response to stimuli, to perform some conventional action, like pressing a certain piano key. Here we are reproducing in an artificial setting the same conditions of diverse reaction to objects of the external world that occur in real life and account for much of our behavior. With the child we are conducting experiments that would show his ability to choose from a number of possibilities, and to differentiate one action from another.

Let us suppose that we give the child a number of pictures, one after the other such as an axe, apple, letter, chair, etc. on the understanding that he will press one key on a toy piano keyboard in response to the first of them, another in response to the second, and so on. The child will, of course, find the task of memorizing and successfully carrying out these instructions quite difficult, especially if we give him a choice among eight different stimuli.

If we give a child aged 5-6 this problem to solve, he will try to solve it by all the means at his disposal. Strictly speaking he does not yet use any particular “devices”, usually deciding simply to memorize and carry out the task. However, if after several attempts he still cannot memorize the instructions and correctly perform the choice reaction, he gives up, despairing of success and announcing that he is unable to do it.

If we propose to a child that he should use some artificial device to help him solve the problem, we will find that our young test subject is incapable not only of inventing any artificial facilitating device, but also of mastering any technique proposed to him. This is a primitive phase, or one characterized by natural forms of behavior. Its distinguishing feature is the fact that the child adapts to any situation exclusively by means of those natural functions, such as the natural imprinting of separate actions. The idea that he could resolve the problem in a more advanced way, by using certain devices, and functionally using stimuli as symbols, is still alien to him.

Let us now try to make his task easier. We shall give our child a second series of cards on stands and propose to him that he should use them as markers by placing them along the keyboard next to the appropriate keys. We may choose this second row so that each card will remind him of cards in the first series, serving as conventional stimuli (1st series axe; 2nd series boy chopping down tree; apple pear; letter steamer; beetle butterfly, and so on). By arranging them in a certain order the child can supplant his own choice reaction, which though natural is nonetheless very complex, by an artificial process of adaptation based on a mediate mnemotechnical operation, and successfully solve the problem. To do this he merely needs to understand that the cards proposed to him on stands can play a functionally different role as auxiliary symbols, and that for this purpose all he has to do is to establish the corresponding link between them and the first series of stimuli.

This latter notion is well beyond the reach of the child at an earlier phase of development. It would never occur to him that the auxiliary cards proposed to him could play any role at all, that they could be in any way related to the cards in the first series, and that it is possible to make a connection between them that could be helpful in solving the problem at hand, or that they could be used as a means of performing a psychological operation.

A child in this phase can act only through the simplest natural means; just like certain animals, including the highest, he is incapable of functionally mastering tools to solve complex psychological problems, and this fact leaves a decisive imprint on his behavior.

Before he can develop further, he has to shift from this natural stage of behavior to a more complex one; he has to expand his natural capabilities by learning to use tools and devices; he has to make the transition from the natural to the cultural stage of development.

If we try the same experiment on a slightly older child, aged 6-7 years, we will find that without memorizing our instructions immediately, he promptly resorts to auxiliary symbols, if we propose them to him. Certain peculiarities in the way he uses these auxiliary pictures will of course suggest that his mastery of the use of auxiliary devices has by no means taken the forms typical of the adult. In actual fact the child makes full use only of those pictures that remind him most readily of our basic stimulus. For example, in response to the stimulus “axe” he is supposed to press a certain key; he takes the auxiliary picture “boy with axe” and places it next to the key. By placing his marker and later, looking for it when the stimulus is repeated he acquires a technique for correctly implementing the required reaction. This happens, however, only in isolated instances. On the whole his behavior has a different characteristic: finding that, in isolated instances, the auxiliary symbols really can help him solve the problem, and not realizing why that is so, he decides that all he has to do is externally perform a successful operation placing any symbol next to the keys for the problem to be solved, and for him to be able to remember automatically when to press that key. The fact that the child places symbols at random, shows that he is no longer concerned with memorization; he is naively sure that “the symbol will memorize for him”. Indeed one young test subject of ours, having placed a nail in the appropriate place next to the key, confidently announced that “the nail will remember”, and there was no further need for him to solve the problem.

Such a divergence between the use and the understanding of a certain device, such a naive faith in the adequacy of the symbol, per se, with no understanding of its meaning and no ability to really use it, is characteristic of this stage of the child’s cultural development. We have seen a child take a random object, unconnected to the stimulus, and place it in front of him, “so as to memorize”; moreover he would often take a series of identical objects (nails, feathers, etc.) and arrange them in front of each key, making no attempt whatever to link each symbol to the stimulus presented, and naively believing that this purely external action was all that was needed.

There are accordingly grounds for considering that the child passes through a peculiar phase of cultural development; that of a naive attitude to external cultural operations, or a “magical” phase.

In some ways this phase is reminiscent of certain features of the thinking of primitive man as he begins to master individual devices, but is unaware of their limits and develops a whole naive strategy based on an inadequate understanding of the mechanisms of those operations that really help him adapt to the external world.

We were able to reproduce this phase in the development of the child’s thinking, in a fairly pure form, in the above-mentioned experiment; but we can discern extensive echoes of this naive phase in real life. If we were to try to collect all such devices that are in widespread use among young school children, we would find that this “naive psychology” is often quite rich in children and that besides those devices that truly help the child master certain problems, he also has devices that resemble the proper ones only superficially, whereas they are actually based on the primitive conclusions of a peculiar children’s logic, and on blind faith in the external device, whose meaning remains obscure to the child.

We may assume that such a primitive, inappropriate attitude to objects, and to their own mental processes can easily be found in other spheres of the evolution of the child (the development of drawing, writing and counting), and that this attitude characterizes an entire phase in the history of behavior.

Let us now take one more step forward, and consider the character of the further evolution of the cultural behavior of the child.

Whereas, during the phase of development we have just described, the child’s ability to use external devices is still inadequate, as he gradually develops, he very quickly begins to grasp the actual mechanisms whereby they operate, and to use them intelligently. He now realizes that the auxiliary cards and symbols are helpful only when he links them to the stimulus presented to him, and that he cannot rely on any symbol at random, but only on those that can be connected to the stimulus. He no longer considers the symbol as an independent factor, but moves to a new, complex mode of behavior, in which the auxiliary object begins to occupy a distinctive, functional “ancillary” place.

The “natural” way of solving difficult problems gradually changes to a complex way, resorting to the use of tools, marking the beginning of the cultural phase of behavior. By studying the memory of the child, or using the experiment just outlined, we can explore the gradual growth of the child’s ability to use such auxiliary symbols. A child aged 6-7 is capable of establishing only the most primitive link; he may use only the symbol that plainly and immediately reminds him of the stimulus. In this way he easily remembers the picture of the apple by linking it to the picture of a pear, “because they taste nice”; he places the picture in front of the right key, which is, in his real-life experience, directly connected with the stimulus that is supposed to prompt him to press the key. Even so, his ability to use auxiliary symbols has made little progress. For example, when given two cards with very dissimilar contents, he cannot devise a way to use one of them as a tool to remember the other. It will be some time before he is able not only to use those connections directly, but also to actively visualize the auxiliary structures. In 8, above, we have already given an example of such structures; the child memorizes the word do spade” by means of a card depicting some chickens, explaining that “they dig in the earth with their beaks, like a spade”; with astonishing wit, children even turn some very remote things into memorization tools.

We shall give just one example to show how cleverly a child aged 9-10 can use such external devices. The problem we gave the child required him to press the right keys when he heard certain words. For help with memorization, we gave him a small box full of nails, screws, feathers, bits of rubber tubing, and other assorted junk. The child immediately examined all these things, and we started the experiment.

The word “night” is uttered; the child placed a piece of rubber tube in front of the appropriate key (explanation: “here inside the tube, it is dark, like night”); for the word “mother”, the child placed a feather in front of, and at right angles to, the key (“that’s Mummy, and she’s sleeping” for the word “wood”, the child took a nail and laid it on its side (“they cut a tree down in the forest, and there it lies”); for the word “school”, the child took a hollow pipe (“it’s like a little house, and the children are learning inside”). In this way the child was given eight words, in response to each of which he had to press a new key. After the stimulus-word had been uttered just once, and the symbols had been put in their places, the child performed the choice reaction and, considering the difficulty of the problem, did so in a remarkably short time.

In the next experiment, the child was given different words, and those same symbols were used in another context, acquiring new meanings: the rubber pipe brought to mind the word “smoke” “because smoke can come out of it”, the feather was used to symbolize the word “oar”, and so on. Once again, the child proved able to solve this problem without a mistake.

To some extent of course, all the experiments described here are artificial; yet we believe that they help us elucidate the mechanisms that enable the psyche of the school child and that of the civilized adult to function. After all, in these experiments we are merely bringing to the surface those devices that each of us uses and that have become an organic part of the behavior of every civilized adult.

An interesting trait was observed in our experiments: at a certain stage of development, a child who has repeated many times the experiment involving memorization with the help of external auxiliary marks, begins to dispense with them. He does so not because they are beyond his ability, but because he has outgrown them. What he used to do with the help of external symbols he now begins to do with the help of internal devices, which wholly supplant the external symbols through which he learned. A child who had previously used cards to memorize, now begins to rely on his own internal system, planning and connecting the material with his own previous experience, so that internal images, constantly stored in the memory and hidden from view, begin to play a functionally auxiliary role, serving as intermediate links for memorization.

In this way, the structure of the neuro-psychic processes, developing and changing, begins to be based on an entirely new system. Processes that had previously been natural now become complex, formed by cultural impact and the influence of a number of conditions, primarily that of active communication with the environment.

Having been processed in school and in life, and having learned cultural devices, the child now begins to use mediate techniques to solve the complex real-life problems that he had been unable to solve through natural, immediate adaptation. In an active encounter with the environment he elaborates the ability to use the things of the external world as tools or symbols. While the functional use he makes of them is at first naive and inadequate, the child gradually masters them and eventually outgrows them, elaborating the ability to use his own neuro-psychic processes as devices for reaching certain objectives. Natural. behavior becomes cultural, as external devices and cultural symbols, nurtured by social life, become internal processes.

Metaphorically speaking, we may say that this is exactly the same process that occurs in the transition from natural agriculture to cultivation. When under cultivation, and subject to new conditions, fertilizer, better farm tools and care of the soil, land whose fertility had previously been limited by its natural conditions (its quality, the weather, the sprouting of randomly distributed seeds), begins to yield much greater harvests. Gradually, under the influence of prolonged cultivation, it changes to the point where it becomes a culture capable of maximum output. If this is so, if we need to approach even agriculture, which seems endlessly dependent on natural factors, from the standpoint of the transformed influence of a cultured economy, then we should pay all the greater attention to that same phenomenon in the case of human behavior. In the light of our present knowledge, it would be a severe mistake to view man as a creature left entirely with the qualities provided by nature, even if they have been augmented.

Man is a social creature, and socio-cultural conditions profoundly change him, developing numerous new behavioral forms and devices. The careful study of those distinctive traits is a specific task for psychological science.