Lindsley, Ogden R., 1922–2004

Ogden R. Lindsley Jr. was born on August 11, 1922, in Providence, Rhode Island. He grew up and went to school in and around Providence. His mother, Mildred, was a college-educated homemaker, and his father, Ogden, was a lawyer. His father was killed in an automobile accident when he was 38 and Lindsley was 13 years old. Lindsley had one sibling, a younger brother Bradford, who was also killed in an automobile accident in 1960 at age 35.

Lindsley entered Brown University in 1940. However, in 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force and served during World War II from 1942 to 1945. He was an engineer-gunner on a B24-J plane and was shot down over Yugoslavia while returning to his airbase in Lecce, Italy, after bombing the Ploesti oilfields in Rumania in July 1944. Nine of the 10 crew members parachuted to safety but were captured and imprisoned in a German POW camp. Lindsley spent 9 months as a POW and escaped in April 1945.

Upon his return from World War II, Lindsley reentered Brown University and received his BA with Highest Honors in Experimental Psychology and Histochemistry in 1948. In 1950, he received his MS in Experimental Psychology, also from Brown. Carl Pfaffman was a major influence during Lindsley's time at Brown, teaching him the discipline and attention to detail required to conduct quality laboratory science in electrophysiology.

In 1950, Lindsley moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue his doctoral studies at Harvard with Robert Galambos in electrophysiology. However, Galambos left Harvard shortly after Lindsley's arrival, and subsequently Lindsley began work with B. F. Skinner, receiving his PhD in Psychology, under Skinner's direction, in 1957. Lindsley indicated that his major professional influences during this time came from B. F. Skinner, S. S. Stevens, and Fred Keller. From Skinner, he learned the importance of (a) frequency (or rate of responding) as a basic datum of human behavior; (b) self-recording, as demonstrated by the selfrecorded performance records of rats and pigeons in Skinner's laboratory; and (c) standard graphic display (i.e., the cumulative recorder) to view data. From S. S. Stevens, he learned the importance of patience and the need to attend to measurement calibration. From Fred Keller, he learned that “people come first.”

Although Lindsley's dissertation involved looking at drug and radiation effects on standard free operant behavior in a sample of dogs, his interest had shifted to the application of free operant conditioning to humans. He chose to work with dogs in a laboratory at Boston University Medical School because dogs were closer to people than the pigeons and rats in Skinner's laboratory. From 1953 to 1965, he was Director of the Behavior Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. From 1953 to 1961, he was Research Associate in Psychiatry, and from 1961 to 1965, he was Associate in Psychology, both in affiliation with Harvard Medical School. During this 12-year period, Lindsley worked with acute and chronic psychotic patients and autistic children and studied normal adult and child control subjects at Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts. The focus of this research was to experimentally analyze acute and chronic psychosis. The laboratory received grant support from NIMH and drug companies for research to develop drugs that would reduce patients' psychotic symptoms and, at the same time, restore more normal functioning. Lindsley's work represented the first systematic application of free operant conditioning technology to humans.

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