3. kafli - Germany and the Birth of a New Science

Question 1

1.Apperception played an important role in Wundt’s understanding of psychology. What is it?

Question 2

2. Carl Stumpf described the phenomenon of tonal fusion. What does this involve?

Answer 2

Studied with Bretano at the University of Würzburg (before his PhD)
Had some contact with Fechner
like many other German contemporaries - cognitive psychologist
studies on audition and pitch perception
Published important book The Origins of Music
His students become important characters for later:
Wolfgang Köhler (Gestalt)
Kurt Koffka (Gestalt)
Kurt Lewin! (Social Psy)

Question 3

3. What is introspection?

Answer 3

Wundt

Titchener

Trained his observers (PhD students)
1. The observer were presented with stimulus
2. Observer explains what she/he experienced
3. The experimenter make causal inference: after altering a condition (with controlling other explanation)
they observe a change in self-report measures.

Question 4

4. How do simple, go-no/go, and choice response tasks differ from one another?

Question 5

5. What did Ebbinghaus discover about the relationship between time and forgetting?

Question 6

6. In addition to founding the first psychology laboratory, what important role did Wundt play in spreading psychological research throughout and beyond Germany?

Question 7

7. What was Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feeling?

Question 8

8. How did the three types of memory Ebbinghaus described (voluntary, involuntary, automatic) differ from one another?

Question 9

9. Ebbinghaus pointed out that memory was limited. What does this mean?

Question 10

10. Who was “Clever Hans”, and why was he famous?

Question 11

11. Why did Wundt argue against the use of introspection for understanding conscious experience in longer and more complex tasks?

Question 12

12. Why did Bühler and Külpe think that having people complete simple tasks wasn’t a suitable way to understand thinking?

Question 13

13. How did Donders’ subtraction method work?

Question 14

14. What sort of problems undermine the effective application of the subtraction method?

Question 15

15. What are serial and parallel processes?

Question 16

Voluntarism

Answer 16

Apperception

Voluntary active and willful nature of the mind

Experimental psychology
Using experimentation - superior

Mind is an active entity that organized analyzed and altered the physical compounds

Conscious experience has 2 components:

The content of the experience (what we see)
What the observer makes of that content (apprehensions) (how we interpret)
Process

Difference between research approach of natural science and psychological sciences

The subject of the interest and the investigator is the same in psy sci!
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Natural scientist: YES
Psychological scientist: if sound is the act of hearing - NO

Question 17

Völkerpsychology

Answer 17

Allt annað en voluntarism

Engar tiltaunir

Question 18

How did Wundt study consciousness?

Question 19

Reaction time method

Answer 19

Was influenced by Dutch physiologist Donders

Donders used RT method to measure the speed of mental events (mental chronometry)

The idea behind Donders’s mental chronometry method:

If thinking involves neural transmission, we could measure the certain mental activities
by measuring reaction time and substracting out the baseline time!
A. Press the key as soon as a light was turned on (average of multiple trials)
B. A choice reaction time task: Press one key if the light was red
C. B-A on reaction time = Speed of the mental event: time for thinking about the red color!

Question 20

Ebbinghaus I

Answer 20

Cognitive psychologist
Unlike Wundt, he had no well-equipped lab and not much PhD students
Undersalaried position in the University of Berlin
Published his famous book Studies on Memory
He developed an opinion after reading Fetchner’s book - Elements of Psychophysics
We can investigate higher order mental processes - learning (association) and memory
Wundt: it is impossible to investigate higher order mental processes because these are biased in self-observations

Question 21

Wundt

Answer 21

Bók Fechners hafði ahrif a hann

Mikið frelsi í háskolanum í Berlin

Skrifaði bok um muscular movements and sensation

Og Contribution to the theory of sensory perception

Aðalbokin principles of physiological psychology

Question 22

Wunt founder of modern psychology

Answer 22

Combined philosophy og physiology

Brought empirical methods of physiology to the Q of philosophy

Lab

Developed various form of measurement tools
Some of them commercial

180 nemar

Nominated three times to nobel

Question 23

rannsóknaraðferðir wundts

Answer 23

Experiments were needed to determine CAUSALITY
* psychological processes were always mental processes
* psychological experimentation was to test explanations of how mental
processes interacted

Question 24

How did Wundt study consiousness?
How did he study immediate experience of his subjects?

Answer 24

Introspection (experimental self-observation)

Reaction Time Method

Question 25

Wundts students and contemporaries

GLÆRUR

Answer 25

GLÆRUR

Ebbinghaus
Brentano
Stumpf
Müller
Külpe

Question 26

Ebbinghaus II

GLÆRUR

Answer 26

GLÆRUR

His works
He had no subject (no PhD student :)) - only himself!
Decided to use nonsense words - words carry meanings
He memorized nonsense syllables (XAJ; CIH, BEQ)
Because there was only one subject – wanted to eleminate any confounds
He tested himself at the same time and place each day
He tried not to vary his activities before tests
His research also on the forgetting over time - forgetting curve
The most forgetting occurs in the first few hrs after learning and then levels off at a slower forgetting rate
Died at his 59 due to pneumonia
Before his death, he published a book titled Fundamentals of Psychology
dedicated book to Fetchner - “I owe everything to you”

Question 27

Franz Bretano Act pcyhology

GLÆRUR

Answer 27

GLÆRUR

Wundt opened his lab in 1879
Ebbinghaus begin his research in the same year
Scientific psychology was in the air!
Opposed to Wundt!!!
Bretano (from the University of Wien!)
act psychology
Larger unit of analysis in looking at consciousness
it was important to study act of seeing itself and not to focus on what was seen
He differed from Wundt in terms of the standpoint regarding how science should be conducted
Rather than small step by small step - grand experiments are important
Introspection is useless - observers cannot accurately report their own consciousness

Question 28

Georg Elias Muller

Georg Elias Müller and Memory

GLÆRUR

Answer 28

GLÆRUR
Made contributions to a number of psychological topics incl.
Senstation
color vision
Learning
Attention
psychophysics
Replicated Ebbinghaus’s work with extention
what kind of strategies individuals use in learning
His lab opened only two years after Wundt’s lab
Couldn’t attract American students’ interest
few articles and books translated into Eng!

Question 29

Wundt’s Students and His Contemporaries:

Oswald Külpe and Thinking

GLÆRUR

Answer 29

GLÆRUR
Earned his PhD with Wundt in 1887
served as chief assistant in Wundt’s lab and as instructor for many of the classes in psy.
wrote his own textbook - Outline of Psychology (1893)
developed an introspection procedure that involved retrospection
that is systematic experimental introspection
observers experience complicated events - they provide a [retrospective] comprehensive account of mental processes involved