H&S 4 Flashcards
Why is Wundt the founder of psych when Fechner was the originator?
Because Wundt set out to found the new science—made publications, sold it to the scientific community.
- First laboratory 1879!, edited the first journal.
- Founding a new school of thought is an intentional act and requires skills beyond being a brilliant scientist.
Wilhelm Wundt
(1832-1820)
- Pendulum clock- you cannot attend to two stimuli simultaneously—no multitasking
- University of Leipzig Professor of psychology starting in 1875.
- Believed it impossible to study language and memory (and other higher mental processes) with the use of experimental methods.
- He found the development of cultural psych his most satisfying experience.
How was Wundt influenced by the Zeitgeist?
- adopted methods from physiology and reductionism from the empiricists
- During the late 1800’s the Zeitgeist was ready for experimental psychology to be applied to the mind.
- The development of the physiological sciences, particularly in German universities, created a ripe environment for Wundt’s new psychology.
- Breaking consciousness apart into elements (but he did not believe these elements were static).
- He adapted research methods from physiology and studied psychology in the same way physical scientists studied.
Study of conscience experience
- Wundt’s main work
- believed consciousness included many different parts
- could be studied by the method of analysis or reduction.
- was active in organizing its own content (unlike empiricists and associationists).
Voluntarism
- the idea that the mind has the capacity to organize mental contents into higher-level thought processes.
- emphasized the process of organizing the elements, not the elements themselves.
Immediate Experience
Psychologists should concentrate on immediate experience because it is unbiased by interpretation.
Ex. describing the pain from a toothache rather than the toothache (Not describing an object in terms of what you already know about it, just your immediate experience of it?)
Mediate Experience
-provides us with info about something other than the elements of an experience.
-most common way we use to get info about our world. (I think it means interpreting it through what we already know).
Ex. “The rose is red” implies our primary interest is in the flower, not the redness.
Wundt’s introspection
The examination of one’s own mental state.
- he called this internal perception)
- Most of the measurements in his research were of objective qualities such as reaction times.
- Dealt primarily with conscious judgments about the size, intensity, and duration of a stimulus.
Wundt’s four rules for practicing introspection
- 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
Wundt’s three goals for psychology
- 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.
Wundt’s view of sensations and feelings
The two elementary forms of immediate experience. Sensations arise from the stimulation of a sense organ. Feelings result when sensations combine to form a more complex state.
Tridimensional theory of feelings
based on his personal introspective observations. His explanation of feeling states is based on three dimensions: pleasure/displeasure, tension/relaxation, and excitement/depression.
Doctrine of apperception
- Apperception creates the unified conscious experience from its parts.
- the process that organizes mental elements is a creative synthesis (also known as the law of psychical resultants), which creates new properties from the building up or combining of the elements.
- Wundt believed this was an ACTIVE process, the mind acts on the elements. He didn’t see association in the passive way that empiricists and associationists did.
Why was Wundt’s psychology so slow to develop
- its focus on describing and organizing the elements of consciousness was not appropriate for solving real world problems.
- Wundt wasn’t interested in psychology to practical concerns
Criticisms of Wundtian psychology
- People thought Wundt’s use of introspection was too subjective. Different observers produce different results, so how do we know who is right?
- His political views were also criticized. Blamed England for starting world war I, and this made a lot of people angry, it may have also cost him the nobel prize- because of the war there was a lot of anti-german people.
Wundt’s legacy
Made psychology a modern science, many of his students went on to open labs
Hermann Ebbinghaus
(1850 - 1909)
- Likely influenced by the work of British Associationists (Zeitquist), he chose to research learning.
- Before his work, the customary way to study learning was to exam associations that were already
- First to investigate learning and memory experimentally.
- Demonstrated that experimental methods could be used to study higher mental processes
Ebbinghaus methodology and content
- wanted to study the initial formation of associations, which made this study more objective.
- believed that the difficulty of learning material could be measured by recall
- counted how many times he had to repeat the nonsense syllables in order to recall the list perfectly once.
- Lists were deliberately created to be free of prior connections or associations.
What made Ebbinghaus’s work significant?
-carefully controlled conditions
-quantitative analysis
-learning time increases when the list is longer
(remember the forgetting curve, fast and then plateaus)
Franz Brentano
(1838 - 1917)
- While Wundt’s psych was experimental, Brentano’s was empirical. -believed that the primary method for psychology should be systematic observation rather than experimentation.
- Believed psych should study mental activity.
- Questioned Wundt’s view that mental processes involve contents or elements.
Act psychology
Brentano’s system, focused on mental activities (eg seeing) rather than mental contents (what is being seen).
Two ways to study mental acts
- Memory (recalling the mental processes involved in a particular mental state)
- Imagination (imagining a mental state and observing the accompanying mental processes)
Carl Stumpf
(1848 - 1936)
Phenomenology
-Stumphf’s introspective method
-examined experience as it occurred and did not try to reduce experience to elementary components.
-believed that reducing experience to elements made it artificial
Stumpf v Wundt
Major rivals. Two of Stumpf’s students formed Gestalt psych, which is opposed to Wundt’s psych. They had a major fight back and forth through their publications about tones which basically concerned whose method of introspection was more creditable.
