Jay S. Rosenblatt

Rosenblatt was born in the East Bronx, which is part of New York City, New York, the youngest of three children. His mother, a housewife, immigrated from Russia to flee from the pogroms of the early 20th century; his father, a furrier, arrived from Austria as a teenager.[1][2][3]

In high school, the Works Progress Administration allowed him to study art and especially painting. During World War II he was a camouflage artist and he continued to paint the rest of his life. He married Gilda Rosenblatt (née Rosen) who died in 1999. He then married Pat Rosenblatt. He had two children Daniel and Nina.[2]

In 1946, after the army, Rosenblatt entered New York University. There he met T. C. Schneirla who influenced the direction his scientific interests and research would take.[1] Schneirla convinced Rosenblatt that the study of animal behavior would broaden his understanding of human behavior and that it was interesting in itself.[1] He began his research on the role of hormones and experience on the sexual behavior of male cats.[1] Supported by Schneirla, he began his doctoral work in 1958 at the American Museum of Natural History study of early learning in kittens. He discovered that kittens could orient to home by 3 to 4 days of age and that they formed nipple attachment preferences by 1 to 2 days of age. This was contrary to learning paradigms of that time, which assumed that animals could not learn at very young ages.[1][4] In the 1950s, while an assistant professor at the City College of New York, he became a person of interest for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conveyed to the City College of New York.[1] Subsequently, his contract was not renewed he went to Rutgers University at Newark where he joined the Institute of Animal Behavior the Institute of Animal Behavior founded by Daniel S. Lehrman who he had been friends with during graduate school.[1][5]

In 1972, he became director of the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University-Campus at Newark by unanimous vote after the death it founder Daniel S. Lehrman and remained its director for more than 17 years.[3][4][6] He served as dean of the Graduate School of Rutgers University-Newark.[3][5] He also served as editor for Advance in the Study of Behavior for more than 10 years.[5] In 2005, he retired as Daniel S. Lehrman Professor of Psychobiology.[3][5] After his retirement, he continued to work at the Rutgers University-Campus at Newark until 2012.[5]

He was viewed as a successful mentor by those who knew him:[3][7]

Jay was a wonderful, warm, sensitive, caring, patient mentor, and role model to young investigators, post- docs, graduate students, and undergraduates. His was a steady, dependable, guiding helpful hand to all. He had a profound impact on launching the academic research careers of many young women and men.

— from Jay S. Rosenblatt, Ph.D., 1924–2014, p. 1165[3]

In the 1960s, Rosenblatt experimentally demonstrated that learning in newly born animals occurred earlier than had been thought possible (see Rosenblatt, Turkewitz, and Schneirla, 1969).[1] His early work with kittens showed that early learning in neonates initially involved single sensory modalities such as tactile, thermal, and olfactory sensory modalities. As development proceeded these sensory modalities are integrated and learning becomes multimodal. His early work with kittens demonstrated these developmental processes of early learning and set the stage for a new field of research that focuses on neonatal learning in naturalistic contexts (see Rosenblatt, 1971; Rosenblatt, Turkewitz, and Schneirla, 1969).[1][4]

The discovery of early learning in neonates was, according to Rosenblatt, serendipitous.[1][4] It occurred while he was studying cats in the 1950s and when he was weighing kittens on a daily basis. He noticed that when he returned the kittens to their home environment (without their mother present), they returned to their home corner faster and faster each day. The kittens' eyes had not yet opened during this time and so they were blind to any visual stimuli. The only way they could find the corner they had been in is by learning the olfactory characteristics of that area in their home environment where they had been nursed (see Rosenblatt, 1983; Rosenblatt, Turkewitz, and Schneirla, 1969).[1][4]

He did his seminal work on maternal behavior during the late 1960s through the 1970s.[4] This work consisted of two major themes: behavioral transitions in maternal cyclic patterns of behavior and the coupling of mother-offspring behavior during these maternal cycles (Rosenblatt, 1970).[1][4] His work on maternal behavior, starting in the 1960s, focused primarily on the rat as an animal model. He identified three important phases in maternal cyclic patterns of behavior: the first phase spans conception through most of pregnancy, the second begins towards the end of pregnancy and continues through birth, and the third is the maintenance phase, which extends from the postpartum phase to weaning.[1][4] He began his research by describing the phenomena associated with each of these phases of the mother-offspring cyclic patterns of behavior. His studies also determined the role of sensory factors in mother and offspring behavior. He investigated physiological, hormonal, and affective mechanisms and their feedback in maternal and offspring cyclic patterns of behavior (Rosenblatt, 1980).[1] It is because of Rosenblatt's early study of maternal behavior, the coupling of mother-offspring behavior, and his conceptualization of these behavioral processes as occurring in phases that he is often called "father of mothering" or "father of maternal behavior" within the field of psychobiology.[3][4][5]

Rosenblatt's 1967 study of the induction of maternal behavior is consider by many in his field to be his most famous study.[4] In that study he showed that the neural basis of parental care is independent of pregnancy and birth.[4] He found that he could induce maternal behavior in virgin female rats during a 6 to 8 day period by continuously exposing them to rat pups.[4] He also found that female rats that were ovariectomized or hypophysectomized could also be induced to exhibit maternal behavior via the continuous exposure to rat pups. Although the hormonal and physiological processes that occur during pregnancy and birth enhance maternal behavior, maternal behavior has an already developed neural basis in the brain.[4]