Early institutional psychology Flashcards
Wundt is widely credited with creating what?
the first modern psychology laboratory and first psychology journal
Was Wundt a structuralist? What did he call his school of experimental psychology?
some psych texts say Wundt was a structuralist but this is not true - that was Titchner - Wundt called his voluntarism (voluntary acts brought by will) - we now believe that these are automatic processes
-he thought volition was used in even fairly basic psychological process such as apperception, the process by which some mental contents were brought to the foreground of awareness and synthesized into larger units
What processes did Wundt believe could be studied in the lab? Which couldn’t? How did he study those aspects?
Wundt also believed that only fairly simple processes could be studied in the laboratory; more complex processes were could only be studied by examining their products in culture. His cultural psychology was called Völkerpsychologie. This 10-volume work has never been translated into English.
What were Wundt’s research methods?
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Wundt’s research methods involved presenting participants with carefully controlled stimuli, then assessing either verbal reports of perceptions of those stimuli or some other form of response (e.g. reaction times).
What sort of simple reaction time tasks did Wundt study? What was his conclusion?
Wundt tried to time some processes by doing simple reaction time tasks, then adding some cognitive component (e.g. discriminating between two stimuli) and calculating the difference in average times required to do the task.
He wound up dropping this because he figured that for many of the tasks adding a component changed the task qualitatively.
What was Wundt’s legacy?
He was the father of the lab study of psych but did not make any real significant discoveries
Taught and inspired many subsequent psychology researchers
Who was the pioneer in the study of memory? Who was he inspired by?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Ebbinghaus tried to be as systematic as possible in studying memory, inspired by the psychophysicists (e.g. Fechner).
How did Ebbinghaus study memory?
He used nonsense syllables in order to minimize the role of meaning and pre-established associations.
He was his only research participant.
He was a fanatic for experimental control (e.g. testing himself at the same time each day).
He used a metronome when reciting syllables.
Who was the founder of act psychology? What is it?
Franz Brentano
Brentano thought the fundamental feature of consciousness was intentionality, its directedness at objects outside itself.
Intentionality - means it is directed at something outside itself (e.g., awareness of things around us) - consciousness does not exist without the things that are outside of ourselves
What type of experiments did Brentano advocate?
Brentano did not think that tiny sub-problems should be the focus of huge numbers of experiments; instead, he was an advocate of the experimentum crucis, the grand experiment designed to break a deadlock between big theories.
-used other methods to get at the nature of consciousness
Who did Kulpe learn from? How did his beliefs differ from that teacher’s beliefs?
Oswald Külpe, who learned from Wundt, thought relatively complex thought processes could be studied experimentally.
What was Kulpe’s experimental method called? How did it work?
His method was called systematic experimental introspection.
Because one cannot think and introspect simultaneously, tasks were divided into small but meaningful steps. After every step, participants had to stop and recall what their thought processes had been.
What idea did Kulpe introduce? Explain it. What was the controversy about this idea?
Külpe introduced the idea of mental sets.
For example, when people were told their task was to add together two numbers they were about to hear, they found they did not need to think about what to do with the numbers once they heard them.
These sets seemed to constitute a form of imageless thought, something that contradicted Wundt’s teachings.
The fruitlessness of the resulting controversy did much to discredit introspection as a technique.
Controversy has never been resolved - however, it served to show that introspection is not the best technique for studying psychology and consciousness shouldn’t be the topic
What was William James’ influential contribution to the field of psychology?
William James wrote an extremely influential textbook of psychology, published in 1890.
Was not really interested in lab experiments - took a long time for him to finish the textbook he was commissioned to write - psychology was a brand-new science at the time - sort of set an agenda for the topics of psychology
Did James agree with Wundt or Bretano about the study of the consciousness? How did James refer to consciousness?
Like Brentano, he rejected the notion that consciousness is sufficiently fixed that it can be analyzed into elements. Instead, he spoke of a stream of consciousness.
