Kafli 3 - Germany and the birth of a new science

Question 1

Dondes

Answer 1

Dutch ophthalmologist and professor of psychology in Utrecht.

He had interest in understanding human mental processes and physiological basis.

He saw no obvious way that motion and energy could be transformed in such a way as to result in consciousness or any other sort of mental function

Mental phenomena may be amenable to measurement, their duration.

He had similar method as Helmholtz

“subtraction method”
1. add a mental process to an existing task.
2. Time the original and modified task.
3. Infer the time taken for the added mental process.
—
In his experiments, people completed three different tasks,

1. simple response task: respond as quickly as possible upon detecting a stimulus. (pressing a button)
   De + Re
   150
2. Go/no-go task:
   respond to certain stimuli, withhold response to others,
   De + Di + Re
   200
3. choice response task:
   make one response to some stimuli, and a different response to others.
   De + Di + Se + Re
   225

Question 2

Problems identified by dondes methods

Answer 2

1. processing times are not independent. One cannot add or delete a process from a task without affecting the time taken by other processes.
2. Processing is not strictly serial. Adding or removing a precess may not change the total completion time for a task at all.

Question 3

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Answer 3

• CVC trigrams and their justification.
• Sequence length and learning
• The “forgetting curve”.

His study of memory provided a gold standard for creativity and rigour in approaching difficult research questions.

He thought that memory came in different forms, and suggested three in particular.

1. Voluntary memory
   - involved deliberate recall of information.
2. Involuntary memory.
3. Automatic memory.
   - not aware of using (like language)

Ebbinghaus’ solution to memory was to dichotomise recall success, turn it into a binary variable where one either remembered the desired information correctly, or did not.

Question 4

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 4

• Significance in the history of psychology.
• “Voluntarism” (you decide, volunteer) and “Völkerpsychologie (cultural psychology) “
• Response times and experimental self observation.

The tridimensional theory of feeling.
- Any emotional experience can be described on three dimensions: pleasure&pain. tension&relaxation. excitement&interbission(?)

Question 5

Franz Brentano

Answer 5

“act psychology”

He cared what we used our information for, not what we got.

Question 6

Carl Stumpf

Answer 6

Psychology of music, and “clever Hans”.

He did study of tones.
He did a study with clever Hans, a horse.

Question 7

Georg Elias Muller

Answer 7

Memory drum - rotating drum, inside had paper.
Proactive and retroactive inhibition. That you learn things and memories then for later.

He continued ebbinghaus work..

Question 8

Oswald Kulpe

Answer 8

Würzburg school.

Introspection by retrospection, mental sets, and imageless thought.