When Lashley arrived at the University of Chicago in 1929, he associated himself with a group of scientists whose work was permeated with the hope for human betterment. He had been recruited to the department of psychology at Chicago in order to help advance the program in “psycho-neurology,” the integration of psychology and biology envisioned by Herrick and his colleagues. While Lashley supported the American school's goal of unifying the sciences of brain and behavior, he became deeply opposed to their Progressive social ideals. He adopted their general embryological perspective, and Child's gradient theory in particular, but consistently rejected the implications of progress that were supposed to go along with it.

Lashley and Embryology

Lashley's use of the embryological model in his own work correlating brain function and behavior did not spring up instantaneously upon his arrival in Chicago. As early as 1917 he had been self-consciously borrowing terms from that field. References to Child's gradient theory, however, began to appear in Lashley's work only in 1926 and continued until 1935, when Lashley left Chicago for Harvard.