Chapter 4 - The new psychology Flashcards
1
Q
What were Wundt’s thoughts regarding multi-tasking?
A
- Wundt tested whether one person can perceive two stimuli at the same moment
- One cannot attend to two stimuli simultaneously (both stimuli register sequentially; time for both stimuli to register: 1/8th of a second)
- Later called dual-task interference
2
Q
What’s Wundt’s life story?
A
- Founder of modern psychology
- Born in Germany, had a lonely childhood with an overbearing and abusive father
- Studied with a vicar and was permitted to live with him until 13
- Not a good student but improved over time
- Initially trained to be a doctor (earned an MD), but changed to physiology
- Studied under Muller
- Earned his PhD and then spent several years lecturing and as Helmholtz’s assistant
- Wrote ‘Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception’
- Began to conceive psychology as its own discipline while working on physiology
- Introduced the term experimental psychology
3
Q
What was Wundt’s experience at Leipzig?
A
- Taught physiological psychology in 1867
- Wrote ‘Principles of Physiological Psychology’
- 1875, Professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig
- Established the first psychology lab (what separated from William James)
- 1881, first journal ‘Philosophical Studies’ eventually became ‘Psychological Studies’
4
Q
T/F: Wundt founded his own Psychological Institute.
A
- TRUE
- At first, he funded this with his own salary
- 1881, the university recognized and funded it (i.e., it garnered enough interest)
- The only psychological institute, so people were coming from all over the world
- The original lab was destroyed in WW2
- Continued working until a few days before his death at 88
- Supervised over 200 dissertations and taught over 20 000 students
5
Q
What was Wundt’s cultural psychology?
A
- His lab focused on psychology, but also remained interested in philosophy (wrote on ethics, logic, and philosophy)
- Cultural psychology - dealt with stages of human mental development manifest through language, art, myths, social customs, law, morals
- Had little impact on American psychology (took off much later)
- Also argued that higher mental processes cannot be investigated using scientific experimentation
6
Q
T/F: Wundt was initially interested in the unconscious but changed focus to the conscious.
A
- TRUE
- Views were influenced by the empiricists and associationists
- Did not agree that elements of consciousness were static
7
Q
What was Wundt’s voluntarism?
A
- Idea that the mind has the capacity to organize mental contents into higher-level thought
- Wundt differed here from associationists
- Believed that the process of organizing sensory elements in the mind was key
- Yet, the elements are necessary for this to occur
8
Q
What was Wundt’s mediate experience?
A
- Information about something outside the elements of experience
- Other sciences are based on this experience
- E.g., A physicist records data with a device (this data is then used to characterize the world)
9
Q
What’s Wundt’s immediate experience?
A
- Believed psychologists should only be concerned with immediate experience
- Psychology should study consciousness as it occurs
- E.g., Describing the discomfort of a toothache rather than stating just the fact that we have a toothache
10
Q
What’s Wundt’s definition of introspection?
A
- Examination of one’s own mind to inspect and report on personal thoughts or feelings
11
Q
Pure introspection vs. Experimental introspection?
A
- Pure - Unstructured self-observation used by philosophers
- Experimental - Use lab techniques and devices to make self-observation more precise
12
Q
What were Wundt’s rules for introspection?
A
- Observers must be able to determine when the process is to be introduced
- Observers must be in a state of readiness or strained attention
- It must be possible to repeat the observation several times
- It must be possible to vary the experimental conditions in terms of the controlled manipulation of the stimuli.
13
Q
How many observations did observers need to provide?
A
- 10 000
- The idea bing that no pause would be needed before providing an observation
- Thought people were a bit robotic
14
Q
What were Wundt’s goals for introspection?
A
- Analyze conscious processes into their basic elements
- Discover how these elements are synthesized or organized
- Determine the laws of connection governing the organization of the elements
- Thought all psychological research could be done with this data
15
Q
How did Wundt categorize sensations?
A
- Modality (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.)
- Intensity (loudness, brightness, etc.)
- Qualities (colour, richness, etc.)
16
Q
How did Wundt define feelings?
A
- Subjective compliments of sensations but do not arise directly from a sense organ
17
Q
What was Wundt’s tridimensional theory of feelings?
A
- Feeling states are based on three dimensions:
1. Pleasure/displeasure
2. Tension/relaxation
3. Excitement/depression - When sensations combine to form a more complex state, a feeling will result
18
Q
What’s an example of the tridimensional theory of feelings using a metronome?
A
- Pleasure/displeasure - a series of clicks was pleasurable
- Tension/relaxation - tension for anticipation of next sound
- Excitement/depression - changing the speed results in excitement or calm
19
Q
What’s Wundt’s apperception?
A
- The process by which mental elements are organized
- New properties are created by combining elements
- The mind acts on elements to make up the whole (not as mechanistic as John Stuart Mill’s mental chemistry)
20
Q
What was the fate of Wundt’s psychology in Germany?
A
- Spread rapidly but had little long-term effect on psychology
- Not appropriate for solving real-world problems
- By 1910, psychology in America was becoming more dominant (many germans moved to the US)
21
Q
What are the major criticisms of Wundt’s psychology?
A
- Introspection cannot always yield agreement
- Wundt’s opinions were controversial (blamed the British for WW1; fierce defender of Germany)
- Gestalt, psychoanalysis, functionalism, and behaviourism dominated
22
Q
What’s Wundt’s legacy?
A
- Created a new domain of science
- Started the first formal psychology laboratory
- Recognition for formal psychology courses
- Developed his own theory of human nature
- Trained dozens of other psychologists who would go on to form their own labs
- Served as a ‘critic’ for others in developing schools of thought
- Considered the most important psychologists of all time
23
Q
What’s the life story of Hermann Ebbinghaus?
A
- Born near Bonn to a wealthy family
- Studied languages, history, and philosophy at several German universities
- PhD dissertation on the unconscious
- Read Fechner’s “Elements of Physics”
- Became a lecturer at University of Berlin
- First to experimentally study learning and memory as they occurred
- Died of pneumonia at age 59
24
Q
What was Ebbinghaus’s approach?
A
- Believed the British Associationists had it backwards (associations already formed)
- He studied the initial formation of associations between stimuli
- Over a period of five years, studied learning and memory with himself as the subject
- Number of repetitions needed to recall something indicates how much effort ot takes to learn
25
Q
What was special about Ebbinghaus’s approach?
A
- He was isolated from any academic centre on psychology
- Was very methodical and systematic in his approach
- Made sure to perform studies at the same time each day
26
Q
What was the purpose of Ebbinghaus’s nonesense syllables?
A
- It was difficult to experiment with words because of existing associations
- Ebbinghaus experimented with material that would be uniformly associated (i.e., nonsense syllables)
- Used nonsense syllables to determine speed of memorization/forgetting
27
Q
What was Ebbinghaus’s Don Juan Study?
A
- He memorized stanzas of Byron’s poem Don Juan
- Each had 80 syllables and it took 9 readings to memorize
- Then memorized 80 nonsense syllables
- This took 80 readings to memorize
- Nine times harder than meaningful material
- Developed the forgetting curve
28
Q
What were Ebbinhaus’s contributions to psychology?
A
- “On Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology” called the most brilliant memory investigation in history
- Created a new journal
- Wrote a textbook: “The Principles of Psychology”
- Despite no lab, students, school; he made monumental contributions to experimentation (held careful control of conditions)
- Placed importance on replication
29
Q
What’s the life story of Franz Brentano?
A
- Grandson of Italian merchant who immigrated to Germany
- Began studying for the priesthood at 17
- Earned PhD in philosophy, became a teacher at the University of Wurzburg
- Left the church eventually (reading Comte)
- Professor at University of Vienna in 1874
- Church forced him to resign after he married
- Spent 14 years teaching there unpaid
- Freud took several courses with him
- Eventually left for Florence, then Zurich after Italy joined WW1
- Lived in Zurich as a pacifist
- Died in 1917
30
Q
What was Brentano’s psychology?
A
- Disagreed with Wundt’s on how to study mental processes (thought it should be more empirical)
- Thought psychology should be more observational, not just experimental (argued for observations, experience, and experimentation)
- His writings had an important influence on the Gestalt psychologists
31
Q
What was Brentano’s Act psychology?
A
- Focused on mental activities rather than mental contents
- Argued that there is a difference between experience of content and experience as an activity
- E.g., Red flower (colour is the physical quality, while the act of seeing is the mental activity)
- Thought mental activity was not accessible through introspection
32
Q
Which two ways did Brentano advance to study mental acts?
A
- Through memory - recalling the mental processes involved in a mental state
- Through imagination - imagining a mental state and observing the mental process
33
Q
What’s the life story of Carl Sumpf?
A
- Born to a wealthy family in Bavaria
- Played five instruments as a child
- A sickly child who was tutored at home
- Attended Brentano’s lectures as a graduate student
- Eventually held positions at the University of Berlin
- Created the psychological institute, a rival to Wundt’s at Leipzig
- Agreed with Brentano that mental events should be studied as a whole unit
- Termed this mental phenomena
- His ideas became one of the pillars of the later Gestalt school
- Also first to investigate the psychology of music
34
Q
What was Stompf’s Phenomenology?
A
- Stumpf’s introspective method examined experience as it occurred (did not try to reduce experience to elementary components, thought this made it artificial)
- An approach to knowledge based on an unbiased description of immediate experience as it occurs (not analyzed or reduced to elements)
- Wundt did not consider this a form of introspection
35
Q
What’s the story with Clever Hans?
A
- A horse trained by Wihelm von Osten in Berlin
- Was able to solve math problems by tapping in hoof
- Stumpf sent Oskar Pfungst to investigate Hans
- recognized that when Hans could not see Osten, performance dropped
- Discovered the horse was reading subtle cues
- Pfungst was able to replicate this himself
36
Q
What’s the life story of Oswald Kulpe?
A
- Born to German parents in Latvia
- Wrote five books on philosophy
- Studied history at Leipzig when he attended Wundt’s lectures
- Decided to work under Wundt and became friends with Tichener
- Took up positions at Wurzburg, Bonn, and Munich (attracted many American researchers)
- Died at 53 from influenza, never married
37
Q
What was Kulpe’s Systematic Experimental Introspection?
A
- Would ask participants to complete a complex lab task
- Have them provide a retrospective analysis of what they were thinking during the task
- Wundt called this “mock” introspection
- Eventually believed that higher mental processes could be studied this way
38
Q
How did Kulpe’s Experimental Introspection work?
A
- Would divide introspection over timeframes
- Have participants complete it several times to adjust, and corroborate their answers
- Would follow-up with additional questions and points for clarification
- Ask participants to describe mental operations qualitatively
- He required more info than Wundt and experimenter had a much more active role
39
Q
What was Kulpe’s Imageless Thought?
A
- Meaning in thought can occur without any sensory or imaginal component
- His introspection can reveal these thoughts (e.g., searching, doubts, judgements)
- They asked participants to report before, during, and after the task
40
Q
What was the overall impact of German psychology?
A
- Divisions and differences exist in the history of psychology (German psychologists began the movement)
- No longer a study of the soul
- Psychology became more scientific than philosophy (outlined a new science)
- Germany did not remain the center of psychology for long
