LABORATORY AND BRANCH RESEARCH REVIEWS 131The Section on Developmental Psychology was first led by Nancy
Bayley, who had arrived from Berkeley where she had worked on the
Berkeley Growth Study evaluating maturational and environmental
determiners of personality and development in infancy. This section’s
research focused mostly on: 1) the development of measures that would
quantify parent-child interactions and correlate parent and child per
sonalities with the behavioral, emotional, and intellectual development
of children; 2) the intellectual stimulation of culturally-deprived infants;
3) the shaping of an infant’s social and exploratory behavior; 4) social depri
vation and satiation; and 5) emotional dependence in early childhood.^10
Virgil “Ben” Carlson had been recruited from the Johns Hopkins
University by Bell to head the Section on Perception and Learning. This
section’s research included: 1) the effects of LSD on visual functions
(threshold, constancy, and illusions); 2) the satiation theory of perception;
3) discriminative visual learning (constancy and adaptation) in humans
and pigeons; 4) processes involved in stimulus control and stimulus
generalization in pigeons; 5) developing a technique for recording eye
movements and eye position electronically; and 6) the naturalistic ob
servation of rat behavior such as crowding, sleeping, eating, and explor
ing in large colonies housed at Poolesville, Maryland.^11
Virgil R. Carlson, Ph.D.
Courtesy of the Office of NIH History