chapter 5 wunt, titchner Flashcards
personal equitation
-related to transit astronomical readings, conducted to mental chronometry
mental chronometry
the time needed for other central processes besides attention to be studies by refinements of the time reaction experiments; one the speed of information processing was measured, inferences bout the basic elements of consciousness and other processes would follow.
volkerpsychologie
a second complementary branch of psychology that would use comparative and historical methods rather than experiments;
subtractive method
FC Donders
reaction time tests -> more complicated -> RT measured => the difference bw RT and tasks
inspiration for mental chronometry
apperception
one’s full attention is focused on the stimulus, and it is consciously recognized, interpreted and “thought about”
perception
one’s simple response to a stimulus automatically, mechanically and “thoughtlessly”
creative synthesis
takes place at the centre of attention;
perceived ideas organize themselves mechanically and automatically, based on the associations a person has experienced in the past;
eg: 1;2 => 12, 21, 1+2, 1*2 etc
psychic causality
different order of causality determines apperceptive processes;
apperceptive ideas are not predictable since they are subject to unobservable, internal influences, emotions and the indefinable effects of will;
voluntaristic psychology
apperception, creative synthesis and psychic causality in regards to the involvement of conscious experience of will and voluntary effort
Voluntarism= a doctrine that the power of the will organizes the mind’s content into higher-level thought processes.
thought (volkerpsychologie)
different from words, general idea (gesamtvorstellung)
new psychology
mechanistic, experimental, deterministic (MED)
Leipzig
first experimental program
motor time/ will time
J Cattell
in RT experiments, the voluntary decision that made the difference bw simple and more complex tasks
introspection
the obsrrvation and report on one’s own inner experiences;
the most direct source of much psychological sources
contents of consciousness
sensations and feelings
sensations
mode, qualities, intensities, duration
feelings
pleasantness-unpleasantness, tension-relaxation, activity-passivity
introspection -reservations-
- consciousness should not be considered a combination of elements like in chemistry, sensations and feelings can only exist in combination with each other
- reporting of one’s inner states was often retrospective, and memory or emotion often distorts the accurate recollection of these states.
structuralism
Titchner
the first task of experimental psychologists should be to discover the structure of the phenomena they were investigating, before concerning themselves with functions
eg. biology: anatomy before physiology
stimulus error
an error in introspective observation of divining the object from which the stimulus comes instead of reporting the impression actually received.
imageless thoughts
o kulpe
thinking that occurs without the aid of images or sensory content. The Würzburg school upheld the existence of imageless thought on the basis of introspective reports, such as experimental participants’ stated ability to name a piece of fruit without picturing it.
titchner
student of Wundt
disagreed with him on idea that higher mental processes were too complex to be studied experimentally
structuralism
goal of experimental psychology: analysis of conscious experience & their relationship to sensations & feelings
all introspectors had to reduce their mental ideas to elements to avoid stimulus-error, interpretation of these elements would make them subjective
directed association
association between stimulus & word, specific instead of free association
