Limitations put upon particular functions during the nursing period are followed by inhibitions of these functions in maturity, when the organism is under stress. The results of the author's experiments with rats show that animals deprived of vision in infancy experienced great difficulties in responding to a visual stimulus under the strain of adult competition. Similarly, animals deprived of hearing in the nursing period experienced considerable difficulty in responding to an auditory stimulus under the strain of competition. The experiments are devised to illustrate the dynamics of the selective inhibition of particular functions.