chapter 5 wunt, titchner

Question 1

personal equitation

Answer 1

-related to transit astronomical readings, conducted to mental chronometry

Question 2

mental chronometry

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

volkerpsychologie

Answer 3

a second complementary branch of psychology that would use comparative and historical methods rather than experiments;

Question 4

subtractive method

Answer 4

FC Donders
reaction time tests -> more complicated -> RT measured => the difference bw RT and tasks

inspiration for mental chronometry

Question 5

apperception

Answer 5

one’s full attention is focused on the stimulus, and it is consciously recognized, interpreted and “thought about”

Question 6

perception

Answer 6

one’s simple response to a stimulus automatically, mechanically and “thoughtlessly”

Question 7

creative synthesis

Answer 7

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

Question 8

psychic causality

Answer 8

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;

Question 9

voluntaristic psychology

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

thought (volkerpsychologie)

Answer 10

different from words,
general idea (gesamtvorstellung)

Question 11

new psychology

Answer 11

mechanistic, experimental, deterministic (MED)

Question 12

Leipzig

Answer 12

first experimental program

Question 13

motor time/ will time

Answer 13

J Cattell

in RT experiments, the voluntary decision that made the difference bw simple and more complex tasks

Question 14

introspection

Answer 14

the obsrrvation and report on one’s own inner experiences;

the most direct source of much psychological sources

Question 15

contents of consciousness

Answer 15

sensations and feelings

Question 16

sensations

Answer 16

mode, qualities, intensities, duration

Question 17

feelings

Answer 17

pleasantness-unpleasantness, tension-relaxation, activity-passivity

Question 18

introspection -reservations-

Answer 18

1. consciousness should not be considered a combination of elements like in chemistry, sensations and feelings can only exist in combination with each other
2. reporting of one’s inner states was often retrospective, and memory or emotion often distorts the accurate recollection of these states.

Question 19

structuralism

Answer 19

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

Question 20

stimulus error

Answer 20

an error in introspective observation of divining the object from which the stimulus comes instead of reporting the impression actually received.

Question 21

imageless thoughts

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

titchner

Answer 22

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

Question 23

directed association

Answer 23

association between stimulus & word, specific instead of free association