More Than a Footnote to History in Cultural-Historical Theory: The Zalkind Summary, Experimental Study of Higher Behavioural Processes, and “Vygotsky's Blocks”

Abstract

This article presents what is possibly the first English translation of a 1930 manuscript related to Vygotsky's work (probably written by Vygotsky himself). This manuscript, the Zalkind Summary, is a five-point summary of his presentation to the First All-Union Congress on the Study of Human Behaviour in Leningrad in January 1930. This article provides an account of the circumstances leading to the Zalkind Summary's discovery and explores several aspects of it in relation to contemporary appreciations of Vygotsky's psychology, most notably the functional method of double stimulation and the precise experimental data used by Vygotsky to document key theoretical constructs in concept formation processes. The method of double stimulation for the study of concept formation, as developed by Sakharov under Vygotsky's leadership and handed down to scholars in the West by Hanfmann and Kasanin, is compared to the works of various scholars, past and present. This article concludes that the Zalkind Summary is more than a footnote to history: It is a stand-alone theoretical and empirical statement of central and intriguing import to Vygotskian psychology.

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Corrigendum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on a study conducted in partial fulfilment of a Master's Degree by Coursework and Research Report at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, in 2007. My thanks are to Alex Kozulin and, most especially, to René van der Veer, for their inspiration and for support beyond the call of duty. Thank you also, Eric and Carol, for support and encouragement (XMCAers Eric Ramberg and Carol Macdonald).

Notes

¹In this article, I use a number of terms interchangeably, and all in reference to the method of double stimulation in the investigation of concept development: “Vygotsky's Blocks,” “the Vygotsky/Sakharov Blocks,” “the blocks,” and “and the blocks procedure.”

²In the 1962 version of Thought and Language, where the method for investigating concepts and the numbers of participants involved in this research is mentioned, is a piece of information (which I have italicised here) that is not included in the corresponding text on page 105 of Thought and Language (1986): “In this and in the following six sections, we shall describe these phases and their subdivisions as they appear when studied by the method of ‘double stimulation.’” (p. 59.)

³ Luria (1932) wrote of his method of approach as the “combined motor method”:

We have shown … that if we desire to trace the structure of the internal changes which are inaccessible to direct observations, we can follow their reflection in the voluntary motor functions, and that the existing conditions enabling us to investigate the central process wherein arises that disorganisation of interest to us, should not be unsuitable for the reflection of the motor processes. We must find such a system of activity which will include in its parts and central process the affective disorganisation concerned, and the motor process which should be capable of reflecting the central activity and its fate, not as something foreign but as a special phase, included in the whole structure. Only under these conditions of the participation of the central changes and motor-reflected processes in one general structure can we hope to represent adequately in our study all the phenomena arising in the concealed concatenation of changes.

We find such a possibility in the principle of the active union of the central and motor activity. Certainly if we combine in one functional system two activities—the central and the motor—we can record that every central change is necessarily reflected primarily in that motor system, which is formed into a united whole, and only secondarily evokes certain changes in the physiological system to which it spreads. Such a division of the united dynamic structure, including in itself the central part concealed from direct study and the motor functions capable of being objectively registered, is the basic combination of the motor method by the help of which we have acquired the essential material dealt with in this volume.¹ (pp. 23–24, where the footnote refers to articles on this method published in 1928 and 1929)

Further, then, in relation to the paper steps referred to by Cole and Engeström (2007), but which they refer to as the method of double stimulation, Luria (1932) wrote (of the combined motor method),

Such paralysis agitans patients which we have observed could not turn over when on the level floor, but could climb a ladder; they could not ordinarily walk, but they could do so freely if we put on the floor some pieces of paper to stimulate each separate step. Their automatisms were lacking but they were successful in connecting the single reactions to separate stimuli (climbing the ladder or stepping according to the pieces of paper); the insufficient automatisms were replaced here by cortical activities, much more complex in their structure but accessible to the patient. (p. 410)

⁴Chapter 3 of Mind in Society (Vygotsky, 1978) concludes with these images, as illustrations of how fundamental such memory-evoking actions are to human behaviour.

⁵I found Sakharov's approach worked with the more hesitant, younger participants (as advised by Hanfmann & Kasanin, 1937) but not as well for some of the 11-year-olds, for example, because constantly asking for reasons rather than waiting for volunteered information made the interactions more artificial. The adolescents and the adults, however, without exception, opted immediately to sort all of the blocks into four groups. My overall “script” introduced the activity as a game to participants younger than 14 (as per Sakharov, 1994) and as a problem-solving activity for older participants, but was otherwise based on Hanfmann and Kasanin's (1942) script as per their appendix. I also noted that intervention/explicit instructions were not scored in their work or mine.

⁶Although it could be said that English words such as slender implies tall and thin, and robust implies tall and large, one is unlikely to apply these to geometric blocks.

⁷Thanks to Carol Macdonald for this most apt description.